arrange • compose • conduct
Many choirs are renaming their choirs to remove gender-based descriptors from their names. I applaud this trend as we all can do better at supporting our trans and gender-non-binary students as they wrestle with conformity in so many other aspects of their life. Women’s Ensemble, Men’s Glee Club, etc. – […]
We never want our expressions to be static. A static face doesn’t convey emotion. A static phrase doesn’t move anywhere. Giving a speech with a static tone is not compelling. A static human has no life. The opposite of static is dynamic. We are often so hesitant to add dynamic […]
1. Your organizational ability is not a talent. It is a skill that can ben developed. 2. The organizational skill will be more valuable to you than any specific skill or knowledge base you acquire in any class in high school, college, or graduate school. 3. Luckily, your teachers know […]
The first time you make a particular mistake, it’s far more emotionally affecting. The first time I made homemade pasta, I learned to roll it through my pasta roller, tightening one click after each pass, so that the dough became thinner and longer each time. And what I discovered is […]
There’s a board book our family must have read aloud 1,000 times when our kids were little. The last page was a tune with silly nonsense lyrics. The only trouble was, I thought the melody had an error, because it didn’t end on the tonic. Instead of do, it ended […]
I’m streamlining the “Dear People” style letter I send to one of my ensembles, in the hopes that it will be easier to complete consistently, and simultaneously more helpful to my singers. I created a locked template in InDesign, and I can easily update the text boxes after the weekly […]
What is school for? The state says, we need to teach the kids to pass the tests. Seth Godin says we need to teach kids two things: lead, and solve interesting problems. One popular line of reasoning you hear a lot says we should “help students stay competitive in a […]
Part of what makes the first few years of any job, and particularly leading a choral ensemble, difficult is the novelty. Everything is new, nothing can be codified. (Compare it even to a math teaching job, where the curriculum and even the daily teaching goals might be standardized within the […]
As conductors, as experts, we can be afraid to even give away even a little bit of the authority to the ensemble itself. But when I involve my students in repertoire decisions, I overwhelmingly come away inspired, aware of new music, and excited that they are excited. I don’t mean […]
I remember the first time I developed a writing callus in seventh grade. That must have been the time I began doing enough writing with a pencil to require a little physical buffer, and my finger obliged. (These days, I don’t do enough handwriting to build a new callus, but […]