arrange • compose • conduct
What they don’t tell you about a pandemic is that at some points it’s easy to forget that everyone else is going through a pandemic, too. I see it in students and parents – the frustration at difficult circumstances is misplaced to their teachers. I see it in customers, who […]
I’m a big believer in not waiting for the muse to strike in my creative work. I don’t wait for the muse to inspire me to bake bread: I bake bread when the bread bags are empty. In the same way, I do creative work when there is creative work […]
On my morning two-mile walk, there are two dogs who are quite obsessive. You can tell even if they aren’t outside, because they have dug gentle ruts into their yards with repeated running back and forth along the same path. It seems to me that most people want to have […]
Music theory (or as I prefer, music literacy) seems among the primary focuses of music school and, to a lesser extent, many secondary music programs. Setting aside the hegemony of focusing almost universally on Western tonal theory, maybe we can ask, “What’s it for?” Why are we pushing music literacy […]
We get a lot better a lot faster if we aren’t so caught up in our momentary expectations. Have high expectations for yourself. Stop having high expectations for yourself in this moment. My daughter was trying to trace perfect circles around a biscuit cutter, and kept running into herself, causing […]
One of my favorite expressions is “Be proud but never satisfied.” Indeed, it’s imprinted in my musical DNA from frequent repetition. It’s a perfect description of the balance between satisfaction in a job well done and hunger for further growth. But in my experience, the expression needs to be inverted. […]
One of the things I love about attending masterclasses and clinics from master musicians is that I can glean new words to put around musical ideas. Sometimes the words are harder than the ideas – I can grasp a concept, but not succinctly describe it. Hearing someone else’s words can […]
I had a little bit of a down day today. For unimportant but real reasons, I was feeling frustrated, tired, and run down. (I mean, we are still in a pandemic. That alone is enough justification for all of us to have these occasional days.) I almost canceled my rehearsal […]
The thing I can’t wait to get back to is listening together. We listen alone a lot in 2021. Headphones of our own podcasts or playlists are placing sound into our own ears. The person next to us is listening to something different. (If there’s a person next to us…I […]
We learn to practice a specific way of listening in music school. Listen to assess. It’s the first stage of an important recursive cycle that is essential to the growth we have to achieve with a music degree. Listen to assess. Assess for flaws. Correct flaws to grow. Repeat. It’s […]