arrange • compose • conduct
Happy Holiday – it’s the holiday season! How about both at once? I love this swinging medley of two lesser known Christmas tunes, and the great close harmony singing from this classic Manhattan Transfer album. Wishing you a truly happy holiday, whatever you celebrate.
In our societal obsession with work productivity, I think we forget to value unproductivity. We might innately understand the value of playing a board game with family, or reading a novel on the couch, or singing together around the piano, but we ought to consciously acknowledge the value. Unproductivity leads […]
One of my intentions in the weeks and months ahead is to spend a little more of my day in poetry. But it’s not easy to prioritize it. For ease, here are a couple of resources I’ll be using to spur my time spent with poetry. The Slowdown Poet Laureate […]
Welcome to the 23rd edition of The Definitive Version, a regular feature of my website. You can read more about the project here and read all past entries here. Song: “The Christmas Song” (1945)Composer: Mel TorméLyricist: Bob Wells & Mel TorméForm: AABAStandard Key: C Major or E-flat Major Mel Tormé was a legendary […]
I credit Anna and Elsa (and the wonderful songwriters, Bobby Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez) for giving children and adults a number of wonderful mental care tools in Frozen 2. Maybe my favorite is this, when Anna is facing heartache, regret, grief, and struggle and proceeds to self-talk her way to […]
I was taken by this recently-posted TED Talk from a Lincoln, NE high school English teacher. A few important quotes from her talk: They come to school with trauma, and when I go home every day, that goes home with me. And see, that’s the hard part about teaching. It’s […]
Choir directors are real-life wizards. Specifically, they give their students the gifts Dorothy and her friends sought from the Wizard of Oz. Brains – choir offers students the chance to engage their whole brains in complex thinking about a range of issues. Heart – the true expression of great poetry […]
You know now it’s not perfect. Share it anyway. Every idea has some degree of perfection while it’s only in your mind, and every idea undergoes de-perfecting in the process of moving from the brain to the world. It’s even harder early in your development, when you haven’t developed skills […]
In my experience, every piece you write makes you feel like a new composer again. That’s because every aspect of writing a piece comes with limitations and guides you in specific directions. They all make demands on your writing that require you to become a new composer. The text makes […]
A diverse opinion base is one of the blessings of a free society. And yet, in the choral rehearsal, too often we seek to align all opinions to a single reference point. That opinion, of course, is the right one…i.e., the conductor’s opinion. Independent thought, though, is needed if we […]