arrange • compose • conduct
As my composition students work hard to shape strong melodies, I try to remind them to have faith in the next melody. It takes pressure off of my current project to know that there will always be another melody. I still try to craft the piece I am working on […]
If you listen to Bobby McFerrin’s collected recordings in chronological order, you will find an artist who reinvented his musical approach with each album. Here are his albums just from the 1990’s: 1990: Medicine Music. a cappella group vocals with original songs, in collaboration with his Voicestra. 1992: Play. Live […]
When you’re preparing concert programs, what information should you include? There are four tiers of detail you can consider including. Tier One – Title Only The Surrey With The Fringe On Top Tier Two – Title and Composer The Surrey With The Fringe On Top…………..Richard Rodgers (this is incredibly common) […]
Greek thinkers separated love into multiple varieties, rather than the single overarching word we have in English. Much has been written about these different types of love. The choir can be a great place to explore the love that the Greeks called philia, which is often translated in English as […]
My son made custom Valentines for his classmates – assigning them to a Greek God and sketching a symbol for each. I sat and helped him with inking the drawings – tracing his sketches and then erasing the original pencil. It’s so satisfying to remove all of those rough sketch […]
Priya Parker often says that the best gatherings have “a specific, disputable purpose.” That the purpose is disputable is essential to creating meaning, because an indisputable purpose is going to give rise to gatherings where little growth can occur among the participants. If everyone agrees, no one can grow. I […]
Is there a less helpful interpretive marking than espressivo? What I mean is, in what context would you not play the music expressively? Under what circumstances should you sing without expressing the emotions of the text and music? Of course, espressivo is a good reminder to sing with expression, to […]
Children love non sequiturs. Silliness in picture books – even full on absurdism – is accepted and appreciated by five-year-olds. Not so much for kids in their second decade, generally. We generally tend to seek more “realism” in our literature as we age. A five-year-old doesn’t think that being silly […]
When a couple new people joined the ensemble, as they were working to get up to speed on a difficult piece, I pointed out that, “The fact that everyone else eventually got there is proof of concept. I know you can, too!” Proof of Concept is a real-world example that […]
I don’t think that you can overstate the legacy of Dr. Steve Zegree and the influence he had on the lives and careers of so many performers, writers, producers, and music educators. Now, nearly five years after his untimely death, I still feel like you would need four-inch-high letters to […]