arrange • compose • conduct
There’s a moment in my favorite sitcom, Aaron Sorkin’s Sports Night, when one of the lead characters, tv producer Dana Whitaker, acknowledges her failings in the situation. She (Felicity Huffman) says to her boss, Isaac Jaffe (Robert Guillaume): Dana: We did a big thing badly.Isaac: I know.Dana: Can I try […]
Ben Folds: You don’t end up with a 140,000 word book that you end up cutting down, you actually get there. Nick Hornby: Right. I always underwrite, for a start. And it’s when I’m reading it back and doing a second draft, it gets longer, not shorter, because I can […]
One of my challenges as a leader is to accept the power differential between me and my students. Personally, I tend to think of myself as a peer to my students – students of any age. We are all fellow travelers on a journey of learning, and I know that […]
It’s my first time writing our annual Cabaret Show in two years. In the meantime, I’ve made the switch from Finale, which I used from 1993 to 2020, to Dorico. The element that is most important to me in writing our Cabaret Show is speed – I try to get […]
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 […]