arrange • compose • conduct
I remember wanting to learn to mark scores more effectively, and being told by someone, “there’s lots of different ways to mark score. However you do it is fine, just pick a method.” I remember mostly being utterly unsatisfied with that suggestion – what I wanted was a specific tool […]
It helps to codify your thinking. Whether you agree or disagree five years down the road, you’ve given yourself a place to start, and clarified your thinking along the way. As I’ve continued this daily project for nearly seven years, I’ve spent hundreds of hours turning thousands of ideas into […]
I was looking over a score I was finishing up the other day, and I absently thought to myself, “Oops, forgot to put lyrics in.” Only these were horn parts I was looking at. It’s how I know I’m a vocal writer at heart. There is so much I love […]
I grew up sailing small boats near near the northern edge of the Detroit River, in a location where you might see a number of fully ladened freighters in a day. They maneuvered the tight shipping lanes between Michigan and Canada, around Belle Isle and various other challenges. We were […]
Students get ticked off when we introduces shades of gray into black and white concepts they learned long ago. There’s a good reason to do it, of course. We want to introduce students to concepts before they’re really ready to comprehend it all, so we introduce a simplified version. Later, […]
I have been doing a fair bit of tutoring trigonometry this fall – my son has a strong mathematical mind, but his previous trig units came during the first weeks of the pandemic and then in an all-online (teacherless) Algebra 2 class, so he’s been playing major catch up, and […]
I’ve read about readers who like to slow down as they come to the end of beloved novels – they don’t want them to end, because they want to live in the imagined world a little longer. I understand the motivation – I sometimes want to stretch May and June […]
Every ensemble I’ve ever led has had some balance of satisfied:unsatisfied. For many students, we need to work very hard to teach them to be unsatisfied. We are teaching them to be critical listeners, to be motivated to practice, to aim for excellence. But for other students, we have to […]
I have begun to see a few signs of a fresh recognition of the joy of group singing. From students, from colleagues, from my own self. A fresh recognition of what it means to make music with a group of singers, and what it does for our spirits. We have […]
At a Scout campout earlier this year, a fellow parent pointed out that, “The boys never seem to realize that if they put in even a tiny bit of prep work, their meals would be so much better.” It’s really true – they tend to choose for meals the foods […]