arrange • compose • conduct
You won’t know the real milestones till later. School years are filled with commonly accepted milestones. First Day of School, Homecoming, the SAT, Prom, Graduation Day, and on and on. But while those events might turn out to be memorable or even significant, my experience suggests that real milestones happen […]
I don’t have any feelings at all about Coronations, Weddings, or other British royal events. But let’s have more events where music – and specifically new music – is central to the experience. Reports are that there were twelve new commissions for the King Charles III’s Coronation today. That’s a […]
In a masterclass being led by April mini, I heard her reference a line Steve Zegree said often to his groups. “I only ask two things of you,” she said. “Work hard and trust me.” With a good leader and a willing group, there’s a lot that can be done […]
Is each part of your practice integral, or are some things just side habits along for the ride? My writing practice is to simple: sit and write daily. But recently I find it hard to begin my writing except at the end of the day. I can sit and not […]
Sometimes what’s called for is White Rabbit Mode. The white rabbit in Alice In Wonderland constantly shouts “I’m late!” as he bustles and hurries through the story. In plenty of rehearsals, there’s a little time for digression, for stories, for flights of fancy and following musical ideas and experiments. Other […]
Are your singers emphasizing words like they’re the TikTok text-to-speech voice? The ubiquitous text-to-speech voice from TikTok is immediately recognizable once you’ve heard it. And part of that is for the stilted, easily parodied diction. She! kind! of! emphasizes! every! word! excitedly! It’s clear that sometimes choirs can forget to […]
You have to turn off the infinite tap. Media is effectively infinite now. The media (film, tv, music, podcasts, books & articles, social, etc.) that is inside your niche is vast enough that you need never stop consuming it. But. If you don’t turn it off, you can’t make your […]
We think of creativity as something rare. It isn’t. Creativity is the default setting for every five-year-old. Just listen to them tell a joke. Five-year-olds learn the form of a joke and then immediately get creative in variations – some funny, some not. They are not self-critical as they play […]
The trick to successfully avoiding last-minute scrambling is to anticipate the problem sooner. If you see a challenge a week out instead of the day of, you’re going to have so much more time to prepare for, adjust to, and solve a problem. The day it arrives, you’ll be in […]
Writing music to impress is an essential stage of a composer’s development. You might need to impress your early supporters, your teachers, your classmates and colleagues. It’s an essential stage. Let it be a stage. The best music you’ll write is on the other side of that stage. When you […]