arrange • compose • conduct
Follow your passion? Yes. Passion is essential but not sufficient. In addition to passion, these are essential for success: Helpful but not essential traits include: What’s missing from your essential arsenal? That’s where to focus your efforts.
Some pieces just…resist memorization. In my experience, the toughest pieces to memorize are not necessarily the most complex, or longest, or difficult. Indeed, it tends to surprise me when an ensemble struggles to put down their music. For the piece that my ensemble is dueling with at the moment, I […]
Knowing how long it will take to learn a skill is essential to maintaining a positive outlook – and succeeding in learning it. Learning to sing an A on command in rehearsal reliably takes my students a couple of months. Learning to scat like Ella will take 1,000 hours of […]
Learning to align actions with goals is a hallmark of maturity. But it’s not as easy as we adults sometimes make it out to be. Lots of parents and educators might shout, “Make better choices,” but if a young person hasn’t taken all the necessary steps, it’s just not very […]
Fine-tuned skills require repetition. I know when my bread dough needs more flour. I must have baked over 1,000 loaves of my sandwich bread at this point. And at some point along the way, I gained a much finer sense of exactly the consistency I need it to be. Two […]
How do you practice well? There are so many keys to effective practice; one often overlooked is assessment. If you aren’t assessing yourself as you practice, you are much more likely to be undermining your growth with inefficient practice. HOW do you assess yourself in practice? Most importantly, prioritize self-assessment […]
Skills don’t stay solid. I tried to open an old document in Finale today, to make some quick edits. (I haven’t used Finale regularly since 2020, when I switched to Dorico.) I found that I couldn’t effectively make the changes I wanted to make, because my software skills, which I […]
Practice benefits from this delusion. You don’t show any tangible improvement via practice from one day to the next. It’s only over time that the practice starts to become evident. So it’s perfectly lucid to think along these lines: “This practice doesn’t help. I’m not good at this now, and […]
Good practice mindset is knowing tomorrow won’t be different. Practice takes time. It takes repetition, and it takes repeated repetition. If you want to grow a skill, you will need practice – regardless of what the skill is. Along the way, your skill level today will almost always be indistinguishable […]
How do you stay focused on the big picture when it’s hard to get beyond today? The tasks, the responsibilities, the small crises that make every day new just keep coming. But I try to give a few minutes every Sunday to staying ahead of the daily surprises. A couple […]