arrange • compose • conduct
In the fall of 2014, I committed to writing daily. The reasoning was that I was having trouble prioritizing my weekly-ish writing, and I didn’t want to miss too many weeks. A daily habit would be harder to forget about. It’s really true. These days, the hardest days to write […]
You keep your New Year’s celebration. For me, today is all about celebrating Public Domain Day! Every year for the last few years, music from 95 years previous has entered the public domain. 2022 is no exception, welcoming all music published in 1926. We are well into the early years […]
2021 started and ended with huge rises in COVID spread. It’s tempting to say that it was 2020 all over again, but it was palpably different. With vaccinations and more knowledge about effective mitigation, we were able to do a lot more normal things, even as we missed out on […]
I wrote and published every day in 2021, with my streak now standing at just over seven uninterrupted years. This year, I wrote a little over 75,000 words – 6,000+ per month, or around 200 per day. In the midst of that, I also was able to take the entire […]
Every year I’m excited to do a roundup of the favorite recordings that either came out, or were first heard by me, that year. This year I’m expanding the list beyond audio music recordings to a few other categories, reflecting the nature of my listening this year. Music In The […]
Books remain at the heart of the media I consume – not perhaps the most significant by volume, but certainly by the effect they have on my life. That said, I read just 12 books in 2021. This is the lowest number of books I’ve read since I started keeping a […]
The first time I bake or cook a new recipe, I try to follow it to the letter. No substitutions, no tweaks, no “I think it’ll taste better if…”. That’s because I don’t know yet what’s integral and what’s flexible. After I’ve made it at least once, a recipe is […]
I’ve just started digging into Atomic Habits by James Clear, and it’s already evident that there’s a lot here applicable to music education. Consider: Your outcomes are a lagging measure of your habits. Your net worth is a lagging measure of your financial habits. Your weight is a lagging measure […]
I’ve written multiple times about our family’s work for more disconnected time, and in particular about our adoption of a 24/6 approach, which we termed “Singing Brook Days.” Full disclosure: we’ve struggled to implement them regularly since school started. And I miss them deeply. (Sounds like a New Year’s Resolution […]
A few years ago, Terry Gross got songwriting team Hugh Martin and Ralph Blaine to talk about writing their classic “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas,” and in particular about the various versions of the lyric. They began by sharing the original penultimate lyric, which Judy Garland refused to sing: […]