arrange • compose • conduct
Here’s a thought Alice Parker shared with me during one of our conversations last year. Like Alice, I spend my musical life switching between writing music for others and conducting music by others. After a lifetime of this, Alice says that for her composing and conducting are 2 sides of the […]
Dear Music Teachers, You did it! You survived another impossibly busy December. You can’t even begin to count the number of concerts, carol arrangements, or illnesses that you surmounted to get from Thanksgiving to today. How many times do you suppose you blew a pitch pipe in the last three […]
Less than a week until Christmas. What do you want from Santa? The Real Group is asking for the right thing in Anders Edenroth’s “The World For Christmas.” …hear the unspoken wish from a tiny, tiny dot: “I only want the world for Christmas, the blue-green, forever turning world for […]
Why should you take the time, effort, and money to commission new music for your choir? 1. If you want to see great new music enter the repertoire, you should get out there and pay writers to write it! 2. It’s more affordable than you think. Seriously. 3. Sometimes it’s […]
This was my first vocal jazz Christmas album, purchased from Harmony House when I was a sophomore in high school. Was I lucky, or what? It contains marvelous arranging by masters of the genre, a guest appearance by Tony Bennett, and The Manhattan Transfer singing at the top of their […]
This is not a democracy…but we are on a journey of discovery together. We aren’t going to vote on where to breathe…but we will experiment with different ideas. I don’t have all the answers…but I will take all the answers you have and make a final decision. I had an […]
tl;dr: the right version is the longer version. I have long wondered why in every hymn-tune setting of Joy To The World, the second phrase feels like it’s missing a measure. Here is an example from the 1917 Presbyterian Hymnal: Note the phrase lengths: 4-3-4-4-4. And yet, most recorded versions […]
When I was in high school, if someone said, “you need to listen to XYZ,” here’s how I could hear it. At someone else’s house. (with friends) A mix tape someone gave to me. (with friends, even if they weren’t there) On the radio. (alone or with friends) Buy the […]
How do you know you’re chasing the right dream? Easy. How do you feel when you’re away from it? I gladly tell people that one of the reasons I wake before dawn to write is because if I go too many days without writing music, I get difficult to be […]
What do you do when your rehearsal plan isn’t working? No matter how prepared you are, the state of your singers that day can occasionally mean that your plan won’t work. The Post-Thanksgiving Monday rehearsal is always awful and I never remember. Five days of relaxing – and often travel […]