Letting Your Interpretation Evolve
Does your musical interpretation evolve? Do you let it evolve in front of students?
Music Literacy
Notes Are Contextual
“Can you play my note in measure 37?” No, but…
Learn To Make Musical Decisions
Music educators must give our students experience making musical decisions.
Caught Cheating
No one loses but you when you cheat at reading your music.
Read With Your Eyes Closed
That’s how to get good a sight reading. Well, kind of.
Changes in Your Score
I never finish a vocal jazz score without including chord changes in the vocal part.
Three Moments of Musical Literacy
There are three moments from my high school years that stand out for me as inspiring my desire for musical literacy, and specifically for the kind of musical skills I gravitated towards. Three musical professionals in my life offhandedly demonstrated their literacy in a way that resonates to this day. […]
Composition Demos
I don’t play sequenced compositional demos for my students. Honestly, I don’t much listen to notation output for assessment purposes anymore. I’d rather audiate the score or hear it through my own fingers at the piano. I do appreciate it when composers send them to me – it’s a great […]
Più Mosso
I recently changed my mind about opting for Italian musical terms in my scores. It came after receiving a new score with Italian marking such as Più Mosso and Meno Mosso, among others. It came because they were in a score written by a Swedish composer. The argument I’ve heard […]
In My Head
Sometimes I like to play a little musical game in rehearsal that I call “In My Head.” I adapted it from an Instagram post from the Swingles from 2017: In my version, we sing a set of three in a row, with the lyrics, “In my head, in my heart, […]