arrange • compose • conduct
Games are great for teaching various ways of thinking and being in the world. Monopoly teaches cutthroat strategy; Dominion teaches you to pay attention to how actions interact with each other; Trivial Pursuit encourages the valuing of knowledge about the world; Werewolf can teach about interpersonal skills and group relationships. Even […]
The gift, and the ever-present challenge, of performance-based music classes is the performance. There comes a day when you have to put it out there – whatever the condition, whether you need another week or not. But consider the multitude of musicians, artists, novelists, and other creative-types who never put […]
Like most musicians, I’ve developed a unique set of specific skills over the years. For example, I can comfortably sight transpose lead sheets down a minor or major third. (Don’t ask me to do a fourth, or up a third.) I can do it because I met a situation where […]
Effortless. Precise. These two words often seem at odds in a vocal group. On one hand, you want the choir singing with the causal, free approach of a solo singer who can make micro-variations in rhythm, pitch, dynamics, pronunciation. On the other hand, you want the ensemble to be unified, […]
I love recording my ensemble for a lot of reasons, but first and foremost for the educational opportunities you get in the studio. Here are the five lessons I hoped my students would learn tonight during their first session of the year. (About half the group were first-time members, in […]
The bakers urge you: don’t slice into the warm bread. (The baking teacher at Zingerman’s has strong words for you.) But who can resist that warm, rich, bready deliciousness? (Well, I learned to – and I learned to bake my bread when no one else is around, so it gets […]
I couldn’t publish a weekly blog post. Every day is easier. Every day is easier, because I know that every day, I plan to publish something. There’s no “close enough”, as there would be with a weekly post. There’s either I published today, or I didn’t. And once you get […]
In her fabulous TED Talk and book (How To Raise an Adult), Julie Lythcott-Haims emphasizes the overlooked importance of building self-efficacy in children. Here’s how she describes it in her TED Talk: With our overhelp, our overprotection and overdirection and hand-holding, we deprive our kids of the chance to build […]
March Madness, a multi-week sporting event involving collegiate basketball teams, is an annual reminder to me that so much of our culture is the way it is simply because “We all decided to.” We all decided it was important to have an opinion on collegiate basketball. We all decided you […]
Louis Armstrong was wise, funny, brilliant. A leader, an innovator, and a consummate performer. And when asked how to define jazz, he famously replied, “Man, if you gotta ask, you’ll never know.” I can’t overstate enough how much this hinders the reach of jazz, particularly in the choral world. Because […]