arrange • compose • conduct
It’s the seventh year of the Rockford Aces, and in that time we have had 41 members, counting all current members and alumni. 23 – more than half – of them showed up for the Aces + Alumni Christmas party on Dec. 22, one of the busiest of the pre-Christmas […]
Do you play chess? I have never played competitively, but I’ve found myself playing more as my sons are able to understand it. Already this break, we’ve played dozens of games. Morning chess with Julian. A photo posted by Jed Scott (@jedscottmusic) on Dec 12, 2014 at 4:55am PST Chess […]
Why do we get in our own way? What is it about middle- or long-term goals that makes them so hard to prioritize? A few examples: I could not count for you the number of talented singers (even future professionals!) I have seen memorizing Italian on their way to Solo […]
Here’s a thought Alice Parker shared with me during one of our conversations last year. Like Alice, I spend my musical life switching between writing music for others and conducting music by others. After a lifetime of this, Alice says that for her composing and conducting are 2 sides of the […]
Dear Music Teachers, You did it! You survived another impossibly busy December. You can’t even begin to count the number of concerts, carol arrangements, or illnesses that you surmounted to get from Thanksgiving to today. How many times do you suppose you blew a pitch pipe in the last three […]
Less than a week until Christmas. What do you want from Santa? The Real Group is asking for the right thing in Anders Edenroth’s “The World For Christmas.” …hear the unspoken wish from a tiny, tiny dot: “I only want the world for Christmas, the blue-green, forever turning world for […]
Why should you take the time, effort, and money to commission new music for your choir? 1. If you want to see great new music enter the repertoire, you should get out there and pay writers to write it! 2. It’s more affordable than you think. Seriously. 3. Sometimes it’s […]
This was my first vocal jazz Christmas album, purchased from Harmony House when I was a sophomore in high school. Was I lucky, or what? It contains marvelous arranging by masters of the genre, a guest appearance by Tony Bennett, and The Manhattan Transfer singing at the top of their […]
This is not a democracy…but we are on a journey of discovery together. We aren’t going to vote on where to breathe…but we will experiment with different ideas. I don’t have all the answers…but I will take all the answers you have and make a final decision. I had an […]
tl;dr: the right version is the longer version. I have long wondered why in every hymn-tune setting of Joy To The World, the second phrase feels like it’s missing a measure. Here is an example from the 1917 Presbyterian Hymnal: Note the phrase lengths: 4-3-4-4-4. And yet, most recorded versions […]