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Auditions. You hear potential ensemble members perform under the pressure of an audition process. They aren’t performing at their best, but if they audition is designed well, you get a good sense of their strengths and weaknesses. Selection. You review all potential members to select the members who best fits […]

It’s a celebration for the kids: I’m in 4th grade! I’ve started high school! Last year of college! Sixteenth year of school! It’s a celebration for the adults: 12th year teaching! 25th year teaching! 38th year teaching! It’s exciting to celebrate milestones like these at the start of school years. […]

The days won’t always be this hard. I wrote this to myself, because the second day of school is where it really hits you – a massive shift in schedule, sleep patterns, time management, personal energy use. But then I thought of the student going through a really rough time […]

Karaoke tracks are ubiquitous and essentially free – on YouTube, on streaming music services, on iTunes. On one side, this is great! Young musicians can sing with competent accompaniments, with appropriate style and musicality. (Musicality may very from track to track). Singers get the chance to sing with a full […]

It used to be that if we hadn’t played chess in a while, my ten-year-old would usually lose when we played a game. But when we are playing games daily, we’re evenly matched or he has a slight advantage. This morning, we played our first game in at least a […]

What’s the use? I’ve been thinking about this quote since I read it, and trying to figure out why it so grates me. Obviously part of it is it is poking (semi-gentle) fun at an art form I love. But more important, I think, is it lumps singing a jazz […]

Other album releases will be getting most of the press this weekend, and I don’t doubt that TS’s album is a quality release (I have a Swifty in the house, so we’ll be listening to Lover quite a bit in the near future). But for me, Thirsty Ghost from Sara […]

I love the word and the experience of skeuomorphism – when an inanimate object looks enough like a face that our brains say, “face” when they see it. Houses seem especially likely to me to exhibit skeuomorphism, though I just glanced at my refrigerator and saw a face in the […]

It’s the start of the school year, and that means every teacher I know is thinking about how to be a better teacher. The best teachers I know are even more obsessed with getting better. I’m always assessing and trying to get better, too. So the question to ask is, […]

Alice Parker wrote music for years while on the move. Doing dishes, baking bread. She was a composer and arranger of renown, but she was first and foremost a stay-at-home mother of five. So she wrote the music when she could, and completely in her head. She didn’t notate it […]