arrange • compose • conduct
The secret of life Is enjoying the passage of time. Any fool can do it, There ain’t nothing to it. Nobody knows how we got To the top of the hill. But since we’re on our way down, We might as well enjoy the ride. – James Taylor, Secret of Life […]
One of my favorite poet’s most famous poems is The Emperor of Ice Cream. In it, Wallace Stevens writes the immortal line: Let be be finale of seem. You’d be hard pressed to find a better motto for life. End “it seems like” in the face of “it is”. We must see the world as […]
If we don’t reflect on our failures, we squander the chance to learn from them and improve. If you thought listening back to your voice lessons was hard, try looking back at your failures and being honest about how you failed. Painful is the word. But without that pain, you’ll just keep making […]
Are you a few days or weeks removed from your choral year? It might be time to take an hour and look back. A colleague pointed out to me that he had forgotten many of the high points of his year until he walked through his weekly calendar and reminded himself of the […]
Most of my immediate family recently spent over a week together in a vacation home. My parents, two brother, and their families all descended on a beautiful lakefront home in northern Ontario for games, canoeing, and catching up. This meant 17 people (including 4 under 4 years old), five dogs, dietary […]
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 […]