arrange • compose • conduct
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 […]
“I apologize for such a long letter – I didn’t have time to write a short one.” Mark Twain Clarity of thinking – knowing what you want to say, how you want to say it, and why it’s important – comes over time. You can’t expect it to come easily. […]
Do you know the scene in Despicable Me 2 when the hero, Gru, follows his nemesis, El Macho to his secret lair? El Macho decodes the door by dancing across plates that play out “La Cucaracha,” a la the classic game Simon. When Gru follows, not knowing the code, he […]
“Why is this important to know?” is a question I almost never remember asking in high school. If it was something that could be know, I wanted to know it – that was enough why for me! Even then, there were a lot of people wiser than me asking why […]
I think the key to succeeding in math classes was to do enough problems to see the patterns. Then, when confronted with a new problem, you can say, “I’ve solved a problem like that.” And while the path might be different, it isn’t that different. There’s an element of that […]
The key to sight reading might be to increase the number of chances to try and radically decrease the chances of a student feeling like a failure. I stood next to my son today during a funeral service, and when the second verse came around, I remembered how I learned […]
There are three kind of repertoire: Standards. These are the pieces you’ve conducted enough times that you can correct the mistakes before they’re made. Pieces You Know Well. Maybe you’ve conducted it before, maybe you studied it in depth in a choral lit class or by listening to that one […]