arrange • compose • conduct
Sometimes change happens all at once. I have just begun my last day as a full-time at-home dad. Tomorrow my family heads back to school, and my youngest starts kindergarten. I’ll be at-home, but home alone. It’s been an incredible journey, and one that fulfilled me professionally as well as personally, even as I almost always prioritized […]
Elizabeth Gilbert has said that following your passion is the wrong advice. She says, “Passion is rare; passion is a one-night-stand. Passion is hot, it burns. Every day, you can’t access that.” She suggests we follow our curiosity instead. If you don’t have one white-hot passion to follow, you at […]
There is something to be said for getting your first performance out of the way as soon as humanly possible. Of course you won’t be polished. You won’t sound like you’re going to sound in six months. Energy, focus, ensemble, stamina: these are all skills that need to be learned and […]
You’ve always got a perfect game before you start. There’s never an out-of-tune chord in the silence before the downbeat. Every student masters every concept you instruct–until the first day of school. You will make mistakes. You will have poor tuning, wrong tempos, poor literature choices for your choirs. But the messiness […]
Would you actively discourage your children or students from pursuing a profession? I have a colleague, a fabulous teacher, who shared that he discouraged his children from pursuing teaching. For big and familiar reasons: too high-stress, too low-pay, too low-respect. For children with maturity, intellect, and ambition, he feared it would be demoralizing. […]
The first week of school for a teacher is always rough. Your days are a blur and you finish utterly exhausted. I don’t think you’re actually any busier than you were a week or two earlier; it’s a different busy, but not necessarily busier. The challenge in that first week is […]
For our choir retreat, every year I ask my students to make a list of three personal goals for the year (in the context of the group) and three goals for the group. We meet one-on-one to review their audition rubric and discuss their personal goals, and then sit together and discuss […]
My annual Rockford Aces retreat was this weekend. Every year we include a Saturday night “Solo Night” – every single member performs a solo with accompaniment from self, friend, or phone. Not everyone wants to be a solo singer – myself included. But everyone shares a solo with the group. And every year […]
Fidelity to the Score comprises 25% of the final score in all competitions organized by Interkultur, including the World Choir Games, which I have conducted at in both 2012 and 2014. What does that mean? I don’t really have any idea. I have written before about musical terroir, and I will go […]
In the hours before I begin my choirs annual retreat this afternoon, on the forefront of my mind will be that I have only one chance to make the beginning count. As all teachers proceed into a new school year, it’s vital to remember: the tone of the year can be profoundly affected […]