arrange • compose • conduct
Teachers, I beg you ramp up your self-care now. Everything about teaching right now feels impossible. Fully Remote Teaching: Impossible.Hybrid Teaching: Impossible.In-Person Teaching: Impossible. It all feels impossible. And so you are doing the impossible, day after day. It takes extra support to do the impossible, and with the sheer […]
Having a Plan B is a good idea. Having a Plan F might be self-sabotage. Don’t have too many contingency plans. It can be tempting to spin out many follow-up plans, in the form of “And if A doesn’t work, I’ll try B, and if B doesn’t work I’ll try […]
Here’s a little flow chart for how to interact with your own mistakes. I made a new mistake when I did this chart. And I learned how to fix it for this photo.
At a certain point, we all tend to become accustomed to even the most radical changes in our life. The novelty wears off and we have “adjusted.” Usually. I don’t know about you, but in my experience of 2020, the novelty doesn’t wear off. Perhaps it’s because the novelty of […]
I think the reason it took me so long to try out the new software was because I was afraid. I’ve been a Finale user for 25+ years – enough to learn shortcuts for virtually everything I want to do, and solid workarounds for everything it doesn’t do well. I’ve […]
I am watching a Zoom rehearsal led by one of my mentors and remembering the moment I first wanted to arrange music. April had written an arrangement of “Route 66” for my high school vocal jazz group on a flight home from Europe. It was mostly an extended solo feature […]
You don’t decide on your personal voice. Your personal voice is the outcome of a million decisions. Or a handful of decisions, made over and over again, until patterns emerge. The patterns reflect your preferences, your outlook, your insights. And when the patterns become well-established, you discover you have a […]
I was reminded today of a yearly event that the Rockford Aces used to participate in. The local Education Foundation (nonprofit) would conduct an annual phone-a-thon fundraiser, with calls going out for six nights over two weeks. Volunteer supporters would be given a script, a stack of contact cards, and […]
I wrote for an hour today and then threw it all away. Was it a waste of an hour? It’s easy to say yes, because I finished the hour precisely NO closer to completing the project. And I’d be lying if I didn’t walk away from that precious hour a […]
Pop music tends to focus almost exclusively on romantic love as its main subject. Of course there are plenty of exceptions, but the vast majority of popular songs in the last 75 years or more have had a romantic core. (Or an obsessive core, or a core regretting a lost […]