arrange • compose • conduct
“Curiosity killed the cat.” File that under well-known expressions that send a terrible message to those we seek to teach. Curiosity should be the cornerstone of how we interact with the world. Curiosity should be the default state. “But satisfaction brought it back.” The less-used second half of the expression […]
Prompts for creativity are a vital tool for amateurs. What can a professional creator use? Amateurs and aspiring artists have access to many different creative prompts. It might be as fully formed as a Bob Ross painting show, giving you all the details of how to create a painting. It […]
My most fruitful days as a composer and arranger come when I’m just playing. Others might be more systematic about their arranging and composing – exhausting all possibilities in a long list. And I have those days, too: when I’m not sure what to do next and I simply try […]
We don’t live in the information age. We live in the extraneous information age. The era of information overload is upon us, and the reason isn’t because of how much information there is. It’s because of how music irrelevant information we have to process each day. Extraneous information: the noise […]
Chefs often say that properly salting food as you cook it doesn’t make it taste salty – it makes it taste more like itself. Meats taste meatier, breads taste bread-ier, veggies taste more like themselves. A cake doesn’t taste salty, but if you leave the salt out of your cake […]
I love nonfiction books because they can give me in-depth perspective on a new or historical idea. I can learn more about reality. I love literary novels because I can learn about human nature from well-written fictional accounts of humans. I can have experiences, from the inside, that I would […]
Great singers are often gifted mimics. The ability to imitate what you hear, especially if it’s done well enough to win over an audience, is a skill that has direct impact on your performance level. If you can imitate whatever you hear, you can perform anything. And if your ear […]
I sometimes think that the best advice for a musician doesn’t come from other musicians. It comes from other creative fields – from other creators who work in different media. For me, one example is the marvelous “cartoonist, teacher, and blank scrabble square”, Lynda Barry. (That’s her Instgram bio.) Consider […]
Can we apply the idea of the Overton Window to music-making? The Overton Window, according to Wikipedia, is “the range of policies politically acceptable to the mainstream population at a given time.” The typical range is Unthinkable • Radical • Acceptable • Sensible • Popular • Policy. There are certainly […]
When we learn to make connections between two phenomena, we can make better choices and have better reactions. There’s a particular color the sky gets before a severe thunderstorm; a distinctive pale green that sort of hangs in the air. It takes awhile to learn to recognize the color; but […]