arrange • compose • conduct
I love playing chess, and in particular I love playing chess with my kids: the strategy, the opportunity for growth, and on and on. (I’m not very good.) Recently, I’ve been using an app to play a chess variant called blitz chess, in which each player has only three minutes. […]
The brain processes while we sleep. It can lead to miraculous results, in the right circumstances. I watched the Michigan All-State Jazz Choir start every morning having moved forward as an ensemble from where they were the previous evening. They literally got better in their sleep! Part of this was […]
The only way to memorize anything is repetition. (I generally repeat this until my students memorize it.) So, as I said to my students today, get your reps in! If you know it’s going to take a certain amount of repetitions to get to memorized, there can be no good […]
My middle child was just sounding his way through the Mozart clarinet concerto in his bedroom. My eldest has been making progress on learning chords on the guitar he got for Christmas. My youngest has every word of Encanto memorized. “Gee, I wonder how you have such musical children,” I […]
Today was one of those days where the mundane crowded out the creative. In the midst of many important jobs that didn’t require my musical creativity, I found 4 minutes to be in front of my notation software. I pulled up my current project, hit the playback, and listened. I […]
Have you tried whisking left-handed recently? (For me, that’s whisking right-handed…what I mean is your non-dominant hand.) It feels weird. I’m pretty agile with kitchen tools, but in my “wrong” hand, I feel like a novice all over again. I sometimes do just that, to remind myself the way that […]
There are so many stories of creators who got over the hump of creating while working full time by “waking early.” (I proudly chose this practice for many years, writing from 4:30-6am.) Just get up a little earlier, they say, and do your work before the world wakes up and […]
In the fall of 2014, I committed to writing daily. The reasoning was that I was having trouble prioritizing my weekly-ish writing, and I didn’t want to miss too many weeks. A daily habit would be harder to forget about. It’s really true. These days, the hardest days to write […]
I’ve just started digging into Atomic Habits by James Clear, and it’s already evident that there’s a lot here applicable to music education. Consider: Your outcomes are a lagging measure of your habits. Your net worth is a lagging measure of your financial habits. Your weight is a lagging measure […]
I have come to believe that more than anything else, creativity is a habit. Whether it’s Beethoven, Emily Dickinson, or Lin-Manuel Miranda, we hear stories of them prioritizing their daily creative time above all else. They knew that doing the act, day after day, is the best way to get […]