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Stay Focused. Have Fun. Those were the two potentially contradictory instructions I gave Shades of Blue, the vocal jazz ensemble I direct at Grand Rapids Community College, just before we walked onstage on Saturday. How can you stay focused when you’re busy having fun? How can you have fun when […]

Welcome to Week 20 of The Definitive Version, a regular feature of my website. You can read more about the project here and read all past entries here. Song: “Emily” (1964)Composer: Johnny MandelLyricist: Johnny MercerForm: ABA’CStandard Key: C Major. Johnny Mandel, born in 1925, was and is a prolific composer and arranger in […]

They say the news cycle is going faster and faster – stories move in and out of the news in hours instead of days, and are replaced before we have a chance to process them or learn anything beyond a surface understanding. And the same is true in day-to-day teaching […]

Games are great for teaching various ways of thinking and being in the world. Monopoly teaches cutthroat strategy; Dominion teaches you to pay attention to how actions interact with each other; Trivial Pursuit encourages the valuing of knowledge about the world; Werewolf can teach about interpersonal skills and group relationships. Even […]

The gift, and the ever-present challenge, of performance-based music classes is the performance. There comes a day when you have to put it out there – whatever the condition, whether you need another week or not. But consider the multitude of musicians, artists, novelists, and other creative-types who never put […]

Like most musicians, I’ve developed a unique set of specific skills over the years. For example, I can comfortably sight transpose lead sheets down a minor or major third. (Don’t ask me to do a fourth, or up a third.) I can do it because I met a situation where […]

Effortless. Precise. These two words often seem at odds in a vocal group. On one hand, you want the choir singing with the causal, free approach of a solo singer who can make micro-variations in rhythm, pitch, dynamics, pronunciation. On the other hand, you want the ensemble to be unified, […]

I love recording my ensemble for a lot of reasons, but first and foremost for the educational opportunities you get in the studio. Here are the five lessons I hoped my students would learn tonight during their first session of the year. (About half the group were first-time members, in […]

The bakers urge you: don’t slice into the warm bread. (The baking teacher at Zingerman’s has strong words for you.) But who can resist that warm, rich, bready deliciousness? (Well, I learned to – and I learned to bake my bread when no one else is around, so it gets […]

I couldn’t publish a weekly blog post. Every day is easier. Every day is easier, because I know that every day, I plan to publish something. There’s no “close enough”, as there would be with a weekly post. There’s either I published today, or I didn’t. And once you get […]