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The biannual ACDA 2017 National Conference starts tonight in Minneapolis. Although I won’t be attending this year, I have many colleagues who are and want to share some previews. I’ve prepared a cheat sheet of conference offerings that appeal to my particular interests: vocal jazz, TTBB Choirs, and composing/arranging. I’ll offer separate posts with each area, […]

The biannual ACDA 2017 National Conference starts tonight in Minneapolis. Although I won’t be attending this year, I have many colleagues who are and want to share some previews. I’ve prepared a cheat sheet of conference offerings that appeal to my particular interests: vocal jazz, TTBB Choirs, and composing/arranging. I’ll offer separate posts with each area, […]

Here’s the advice I gave my son at the piano yesterday as he struggles with self-criticism: You have two choices: Be less self-critical of your mistakes. Be more self-praising of your successes. Pick one. They must balance. If you are justified in your self-criticism, you must be justified in self-praise. If […]

19th Century sailing ships, traversing oceans for months at a time, knew all about weathering storms. They had plans in place and a lookout in the crow’s nest to be ready for an unpredictable squall. As soon as the storm was spotted, the crew worked together to mobilize and make sure the ship was prepared […]

If you want to get back on track after one or a few slip-ups, two big steps are required. First, you have to face your errors. Second you require forgiveness. Our brains are pretty powerful at putting up fog to keep us from really seeing our mistakes (until they wake us up at 3AM!). Finding a way to blow […]

My son gets really frustrated with his piano practice. Often I have to sit with him just to counteract his negative self-talk; he says again and again, “I don’t like this.” “I can’t do this.” or just screams and slams the keyboard. Usually. The past two weeks I’ve been really on […]

What is it about the vocal jazz repertoire that merits a college ensemble or all-state high school honor choir devoted to it? What does it provide that wouldn’t be better provided in a pop a cappella group, or a show choir, or a madrigal ensemble? For me, vocal jazz ensembles provide […]

Walt Whitman penned the line, “I contain multitudes.” And while he seems to have contained greater multitudes than many, all humans contain multitudes. We aren’t always encouraged to acknowledge the multitudes. With questions for kids like, “What do you want to be?”, for physicians, “What is your specialty?” for the […]

Today you’ll see lots of people giving up things for Lent; it can be a noble cause, regardless of your religious beliefs, and many cultures include a season of fasting or other asceticism. Putting hard limits on things has a way of clarifying our own minds. But in the long run, six weeks of […]

We tend to think of intervallic consonance on a relative scale – maybe octaves at one end, minor ninths on the other. In between you have every other interval – M3, P5, TT. It has long been my sense, though, that relative consonance is built on a sliding scale. Where one person draws the line […]