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The first thing that gets dropped when you get busy is long-term vision. You’re plowing onward through the deep snow of today’s to do list, and the long-term horizon is utterly obscured. It’s worthwhile to have a trusted colleague with whom you can schedule regular or irregular vision conversations. A […]

Is there anything better than the rehearsal when you turn the corner? The corner to where you spend more time making music than rehearsing notes. My goal every rehearsal is to turn that corner at least once: for some piece, for some phrase. For as much as we can.

The musicians I meet – really, most people I meet – fall into two categories: Too Busy and Not Busy Enough. I always say that I’m too busy, but given the choice, that’s the one I’d pick. The problem is Too Busy is a state that comes with no recovery […]

I think we have an easy respect for physical exertion: if someone has done backbreaking work, or a remarkable athletic feat (shoutout to my marathon-running friends!), it’s easy and right to honor it. But it’s not so easy to innately respect the exhaustion from purely mental labor. But it’s just […]

I musically produce the annual Cabaret at our high school – we select a theme and audition performers, then I book and write charts (37 this year) for a live band to play the show. A few years ago, I started staying on stage during the show, and it’s made […]

I’ve written about tempo markings and “repeat and fade.” My third and final pet peeve with piano-vocal sheet music is crazy road maps. With the motivation of saving 1 or 2 pages of printing costs (a moot point for a growing segment of digital-only music readers), so many piano-vocal scores […]

I wrote recently about one of my pet peeves in piano-vocal scores: the ubiquitous “Repeat and Fade.” Here’s another frequent frustration in piano-vocal scores of pop tunes. Moderately. I have seen tempos ranging from around 90 to around 160 labeled as moderately, and in the 30+ piano-vocal scores I’m working […]

I’m teaching my daughter to tie her shoes right now. She’s successfully avoided learning for quite awhile, owing to flats, crocs, and other tie-less shoes. But the time has come. It occurred to me that the skill of tying your shoes is a lifetime skill – learn to do it […]

If you truly want to be happy during winter, though, this is the wrong approach to the season. Changing your mindset can do more than distracting yourself from the weather. It turns out that in northern Norway, “people view winter as something to be enjoyed, not something to be endured,” says Leibowitz, […]

I made my first flipbook since middle school a couple of weeks ago – inspired by the wonderful YouTube channel Andymation, which I’ve been watching with my kids. Flipbooks are a wonderful window into how our brain works, because we make the panels one at a time, but if make […]