arrange • compose • conduct
Earlier this year I made a personal goal to make the last rehearsal of every month pianoless – using a pitch pipe for pitches and locking up the piano at the start of rehearsal. It’s going well and I’ve been able to apply the lessons to the rest of my rehearsals, relying […]
February 29 is the one day that only happens every fourth year. Four years is a funny length of time – it’s not unimaginably long like a decade, but it’s not as near as a year, either. So as I walked yesterday I wondered, where will I be in four years? What can I […]
Theatrical productions, especially musicals, are exercises in addition. Begin with the text, add blocking, add choreography, add pit, sets, lights, microphones, costumes, and finally add an audience. The most essential elements are the ones added first and last: the text and the audience. Good directors know to keep the audience in mind […]
Waffles, pancakes, pizza dough, lasagna, sponge cake, 2 breads, pasta sauce, eggplant parmesan, macaroni and cheese. Chocolate chip cookies. These are a few of the recipes I’ve committed to memory over the years. Memorizing recipes gives you freedom. Freedom to improvise. Freedom to cook when no recipe is available. Freedom to shop for a meal […]
Do you agree that a mistake is not wrong, and that making mistakes are a vital part of learning? Then we must spend more time teaching students to recognize mistakes. Far too many students are going through life making one of two assumptions: I probably got it right, or I probably got it wrong. […]
In his new book Lit Up, David Denby quotes NYC Beacon High School principal Ruth Lacey saying: “High schools should have the same warmth as elementary schools.” Is it any wonder that the choir room is the most welcoming room in the school? For many students, choir class is the one […]
Last rehearsal, I had a student who wasn’t able to phonate (still at rehearsal, though!). He listened with score in hand and asked to stay after to ask me a question? “How do you decide what to work on?” In other words, with all the things to be fixed, to work on, […]
I’ve been immersed in the words of Derek Sivers recently, and one phrase has echoed over and over, both in my mind and out of my mouth. “The standard pace is for chumps.” He says he learned this lesson from Kimo Williams, a music professor at Columbia College Chicago who gave Sivers four music lessons […]
In his TED talk last week, Astro Teller of the Google X Laboratories said: Sometimes shifting perspective is more important than being smart. He described his teams as actively working to find the flaws in their projects; they strive to spot the weaknesses that make their own goals impossible. They do this because the sooner […]
“Rajaton is our favorite vocal group in the world, actually,” said Morten Vinther of The Real Group during their joint concert in Stockholm last week. Of course, many people would use the same phrase to describe The Real Group, so you can imagine just how amazing a shared concert would be. About […]