arrange • compose • conduct
Adam Neely is a bassist and YouTuber who makes outstanding explanatory videos about music, especially understanding contemporary music (jazz, rock, pop, etc.). His most recent video is a must-watch. Please watch it to understand more about the cis-white-male-centric world of traditional music theory. I’m teaching a Jazz Theory course at […]
The worst lesson to learn from six months of a pandemic is, “it’s always like this.” It’s hard, at 43, to learn that lesson. Your sense of normal does evolve over time, but I have had enough life experience to know that it’s not always like this. In the nearly […]
“In preparing for his oral qualifying examination, a rite of passage for every graduate student, he chose not to study the outlines of known physics. Instead he went up to MIT, where he could be alone, and opened a fresh notebook. On the title page he wrote: Notebook Of Things […]
Nobody knows how Greek Fire was made. Nobody quite knows the recipe for Roman concrete, or the process for Damascus steel; nobody knows the smell of silphium. There are countless examples of past knowledge lost to time. It might be reassuring to think that knowledge builds on knowledge – that […]
What albums could you listen to all day? What’s your “All Day Music”? For me, the music I can let play over and over has certain characteristics: timeless feeling (not totally wedded to a particular era). depth of musical expression that rewards repeated listening. personal connection to a time or […]
We can choose to seek many different destinations: Novelty Satisfaction Curiosity Distraction Dissociation Connection Peace Conflict Comfort One of the main lessons I seek to imbue my students with is to make the destination you seek beauty. Prioritize seeking beauty. To me, the outcome of all art should be beauty. […]
When you’re out in a kayak and a waterski boat goes by, you’re going to hit some waves. You learn pretty quick how to steer your watercraft so that it causes minimal problems. Now, if a wakeboarder goes by, you’ll hit much bigger waves – but your experience and some […]
I have been consistently inspired the past few weeks by the collaborative, supportive, freely sharing spirit of educators. So many teachers are spending every available moment creating new content, researching new techniques, learning new modalities – and they are freely sharing whatever they discover with colleagues. A pandemic makes us […]
When I started writing daily, it would have been easy to get in the habit of labeling each post with a few content tags. Even six months, in, it wouldn’t have taken me long to go back and amend the 180ish posts to more easily find topic-based essays. Now I’ve […]
To varying extent, we all teach in real time, rather than from a concrete plan. Good teachers react in the moment to their students’ faces, to the questions that are asked, to the specific singing that they hear from the choir. We make detailed lesson plans, and we throw them […]