arrange • compose • conduct
The deck isn’t always stacked in your favor in performance. Maybe the acoustics of the hall make it difficult to hear; maybe your section leader double-booked himself and is missing the performance; maybe other members are sick and throwing up just off stage. Maybe it’s all three of those things. Or any number […]
This is an open call for publishers and/or composers to maintain errata online. This week I caught two errors in two different scores (of the three I was conducting). I looked on publishers’ websites to no avail – not only did the individual score page have no information, there was no […]
If I always show love to my choir, I run the risk of having a bad egg taking advantage of me. If I don’t show love to my choir, I run the risk of having good eggs go bad. The world needs more love. In my rehearsals, in my interactions, in my life, I choose to show […]
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 […]