arrange • compose • conduct
I don’t know if it’s a marketing campaign or just coincidence, but many of the best and most famous vocal groups in the world have been popping up on social media – at Cracker Barrel. Tweeting about grits, sitting on the porch, or in Pentatonix’s case doing Q&A’s and pop up […]
We’re roughly 1/3 of the way through this school year. It’s time to ask: when does your choir peak? I don’t mean when do you start to decline: you can peak and stay there for the rest of the year. But at what point in the year does your choir settle into “good […]
Yesterday I got to spend the afternoon and evening making music with a 100-voice TTBB choir from 8th-12th grades. They came from a number of schools and came together for a day of rehearsal, performance, and camaraderie. I feel blessed that I was invited and had a blast working with them. They followed […]
I’m excited to be heading to Andrews University today to conduct the MSVMA District 6 Men’s Invitational choir for the day. I chose Alice Parker’s setting of Stephen Foster’s “Hard Times Come Again No More” to be a part of her 90th birthday celebration, and am moved to find how potent the words feel today. Let us pause […]
Brené Brown wrote in Rising Strong, “Daring is not saying, ‘I’m willing to risk failure.’ Daring is saying, ‘I know I will eventually fail and I’m still all in. Fortune may favor the bold, but so does failure.” (5) There are three steps we should be taking in the failure cycle built into living lives […]
The repertoire of the Cabaret we are presenting this weekend with the Rockford HS Choirs is The Great American Songbook. Listening to auditions, I was struck that the singers fell on a spectrum between two genres that claim equal ownership to the songs of Gershwin, Porter, Arlen, and Rodgers. How does your place along the Jazz-Musical […]
The only way I get our annual Cabaret written in time is by ritualizing the writing. Every song is completely different, but at least 1/3 of the time I spend preparing the arrangement is identical from one song to the next. I’ve learned a ritual and stuck with it. By ritualizing those […]
Yesterday’s blog was titled Pick A Lane. And it’s true – picking a lane when you’re young and following it doggedly is one way to achieve success. But it’s a mistake to think it’s the only way. A life is not measured at 35. Although Lin-Manuel Miranda might be the only one of his […]
On 60 Minutes last weekend, composer Lin-Manuel Miranda described attending a school for the gifted – where everyone was smarter than he was. Charlie Rose asked the question: “So why am I sitting here talk to you instead of one of them?” Miranda: “I picked a lane.” Picking a lane early is […]
Last week my ensemble, The Rockford Aces, had a school-day run out to perform at a fundraiser for an amazing organization, the Rockford Education Foundation. We sang for several hundred people at a luncheon, helping in the process to raise tens of thousands of dollars for their endowment. As always, it […]