arrange • compose • conduct
I’ve been offering my very best advice to a young, brilliant colleague; it’s well-intentioned and from the heart, and I believe I have her best interests at heart. But I worry that in the noise of the advice she is getting from all sides, she’ll lose track of her own heart […]
It’s been a week, and my heart is still cracked open from the senseless violence in Orlando. Or it would have been, if it hadn’t already been broken by so many other acts of violence. Across the world and in our own backyards, our hearts break again and again. My mind […]
Even the stillest lake possesses endless movement. Sit looking at a becalmed pond at sunrise, and it’s easy to see it as perfectly still. But that stillness belies swimming fish, plants growing just under the surface, temperature changes and currents, All hidden from our eyes. It’s the same for every one of our students, our […]
I am on the staff planning the 44th Annual MSVMA Summer Conference, and I’m especially delighted to have helped coordinate a fabulous three-day conference full of amazing reading, technique, and skills sessions from a group of amazing teachers. If you haven’t yet registered, the early bird deadline has been happily extended for just a […]
John Howell was a longtime choir director at Virginia Tech and one of the most frequent contributors to Choralnet discussions for many years. One of my favorite ideas he shared was about audition feedback. Post-audition feedback is not something to be taken lightly, and can be divided into two categories. For his jazz/show […]
We wrapped up our eighth successful year with the Rockford Aces last week, culminating in a 2-hour concert that was widely considered our best yet. I’m sharing here our rep list from the year. The Aces endeavor to sing in as many musical styles as possible each year, with no discrimination […]
One of the things that makes singing so hard is that our self-worth is bound up in our performance. Failure to achieve a standard of singing can lead to serious self-esteem problems and sometimes even stop people from singing. When you play the tuba, or the flute, or the piano, […]
This Monday morning, for many teachers, is the first day of 2016-17 prep. (not, as some call it “Summer Break”) If you’re like me, you want to get right to it with a stack of octavos at the piano, your favorite calendar software open, and an email to students reminding them not […]
Our profession is a little bit crazy. When you hear stories of schools that are so flooded in the spring that carp are swimming in the basement – but the school district can’t convince their community to support improvements. When legislators are repeatedly–repeatedly–eviscerating school policy at the state and national level, all the […]
Peter Shaffer, the playwright best known for his Tony and Oscar Award-Winning Amadeus died this week. I was lucky enough to be in the audience at a talkback about the play that he presented in the mid-nineties at the Stratford Festival in Ontario, Canada. They had mounted a truly outstanding production, featuring Brian […]