arrange • compose • conduct
Is each part of your practice integral, or are some things just side habits along for the ride? My writing practice is to simple: sit and write daily. But recently I find it hard to begin my writing except at the end of the day. I can sit and not […]
Sometimes what’s called for is White Rabbit Mode. The white rabbit in Alice In Wonderland constantly shouts “I’m late!” as he bustles and hurries through the story. In plenty of rehearsals, there’s a little time for digression, for stories, for flights of fancy and following musical ideas and experiments. Other […]
Are your singers emphasizing words like they’re the TikTok text-to-speech voice? The ubiquitous text-to-speech voice from TikTok is immediately recognizable once you’ve heard it. And part of that is for the stilted, easily parodied diction. She! kind! of! emphasizes! every! word! excitedly! It’s clear that sometimes choirs can forget to […]
You have to turn off the infinite tap. Media is effectively infinite now. The media (film, tv, music, podcasts, books & articles, social, etc.) that is inside your niche is vast enough that you need never stop consuming it. But. If you don’t turn it off, you can’t make your […]
We think of creativity as something rare. It isn’t. Creativity is the default setting for every five-year-old. Just listen to them tell a joke. Five-year-olds learn the form of a joke and then immediately get creative in variations – some funny, some not. They are not self-critical as they play […]
The trick to successfully avoiding last-minute scrambling is to anticipate the problem sooner. If you see a challenge a week out instead of the day of, you’re going to have so much more time to prepare for, adjust to, and solve a problem. The day it arrives, you’ll be in […]
Writing music to impress is an essential stage of a composer’s development. You might need to impress your early supporters, your teachers, your classmates and colleagues. It’s an essential stage. Let it be a stage. The best music you’ll write is on the other side of that stage. When you […]
Can you say this to your students? “Everything we do has a reason” is a message I remember hearing many times from Steve Zegree during my time in Gold Company. He followed it by saying, “If you don’t know, just ask.” It’s not essential that we always share the reasons […]
What are your goals for a performance? Goals? Obviously, the goal is to perform your music well! What else? Actually, there are a lot of different and overlapping goals you can have as a performer; some are audience-facing and some are performer-facing. Audience-Facing Performer-Facing All of these and many more […]
A recent request from the brilliant composer/conductor David Von Kampen in the Facebook Vocal Jazz Educators group sent me down a rabbit hole, so I’m sharing the request and my answer here. I ended up with two playlists. One from the pros and one from academic groups. Enjoy! (Note: I […]