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Do the hard part first. If you can just remind yourself of that every day, and follow through regularly, then you’ll find success is approachable. Once you start, it’s a downhill journey, picking up speed.

Stage (pronounced with a long-a) is a tradition in high-end chef apprenticeship. An aspiring chef will take her day off to stage in a restaurant she wants to learn from. The quid pro quo is this: you learn our restaurant-specific skills and techniques, and in return your receive the restaurant received your […]

As I near the end of my first year teaching at Grand Rapids Community College, there is much to celebrate – great music sung, concepts mastered, and friendships made. More and more I feel that I’ve been preparing for this job for many, many years and I’m so excited that […]

Building a legacy in your choir takes time, and comes with many benefits. When you see an established music teacher with twenty-plus years in a school, you will often hear remarkably sophisticated musical performance. One of the things you are hearing is the legacy. The effort that educator paid into […]

The live music that has spoken to me, of late, is art that seeks to unite, that carries a deeper message and purpose. It is art FOR something. Ars gratia artis, the poet said, and art for art’s sake can be worthwhile. But in fractured times, ars gratia societatis (art for […]

Any big project worth doing – anything that is going to in small and large ways put a dent into your universe – comes with a window of time I think of as the “Why Am I Doing This?! Zone.” It’s a given that you will spend some time in […]

I’ve been thinking all year about rhythmic deficits in singers – I think strong rhythmic skills are harder to find in singers than strong pitch skills, and I wonder why. At this point, I think the answer comes down, at least in part, to these two questions: How often do […]

How much of the solution can you work out in your head, before you ever sit down at your desk? I find that if I define the problem, and then give myself the time to work on it as I’m doing other things, then when I get to the keyboard, […]

Life comes in fits and bursts – you don’t know what yesterday’s success will lead to (if anything) and tomorrow’s failure might blast open an unexpected door. The best thing to do is to keep going. It’s the only way to find out what’s going to happen. If you feel […]

“I forgot how to write.” Sometimes, when it’s been a while since I’ve written any music, I can enter a period of feeling like I don’t know how to do it anymore. I feel as if any skills I had built over twenty years had vanished in the week or […]