arrange • compose • conduct
There is a superstition in multiple cultural traditions that hand-knitted projects should include a mistake – it might be to keep you safe from faeries, or because only God is perfect, or because you don’t want to trap your creative spirit in the knit item. Whatever the reasoning, I can […]
I learned in debate my freshman year of high school to carefully select the facts that contribute to my case – to the story I want to tell. This idea of choosing narratives to support a story was emphasized over and over in the essay writing I did throughout high […]
Here’s a core philosophy I hold about the groups I conduct: This group doesn’t belong to me. I’m just its caretaker. This group belongs to you. The members of the group have primary control of the trajectory of the group, of the sense of ensemble, of the progress from week […]
I am obsessed with a current remote recording project I’m working on. (Actually, I’m obsessed with several…) It’s a new kind of magic for me to watch a piece slowly come together, one voice at a time. It’s a blossoming of the art, segment by segment. It reminds me of […]
We react to sudden changes. Sudden changes can be traumatic, but they are highly visible to us, so we react appropriately. We prioritize that reaction, we make the adjustments we need to make, and we keep moving forward. Problem is, much change happens too slowly. I’m thinking about things like […]
The romantic image of creators is one of drawing inspiration from the world and translating it at the piano onto staff paper. Perhaps you revise as you go, or in a draft process, but in essence you are creating in real time and putting it on the page. I would […]
I thought I’d break down the steps to being a great teacher during a pandemic in a lunch note for my wife. That’s all there is to it. That’s all there ever is to it.
I should have listened more vigilantly to those recordings from my voice lessons. Not because they would have helped make me a better singer – though surely they would have. No, I should have listened because I would have put in more hours towards egoless singing. The self-protective ego can […]
I make no secret of my admiration for Tom Lehrer – an admiration that I came by naturally, thanks to my dad’s love, which followed his introduction to Lehrer’s first record by his sister, who heard Lehrer around Harvard in the early ’50s. Simply put, Tom Lehrer is the most […]
The most important job of arts educators isn’t to prepare students for careers in the arts (though I’m proud when former students do pursue arts careers). The most important job of arts educators isn’t to ensure our students make art a vital part of their life journey (though I tell […]