arrange • compose • conduct
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 […]
It’s my wife’s birthday, and she did a Facebook birthday fundraiser, inviting friends to support a GoFundMe devoted to raising court costs to help transgender youths in Grand Rapids get their names legally changed. Part of the reason that the fundraiser has raised over $1,100 in the last 12 hours […]
In recent days, I’ve been doing a lot of listening. George Floyd’s murder ignited a broad conversation about systemic racism in our country, and I am deeply committed to being a part of that conversation, listening deeply, and amplifying the reality. I have been quiet for three good reasons and […]