arrange • compose • conduct
Are you on the fence about turning over more musical decisions to your students? Here’s how I think about it. I am more knowledgeable and experienced than all of my students. That means I can arrive at the best musical decision much faster than my students. I can make 3 […]
Practice benefits from this delusion. You don’t show any tangible improvement via practice from one day to the next. It’s only over time that the practice starts to become evident. So it’s perfectly lucid to think along these lines: “This practice doesn’t help. I’m not good at this now, and […]
The best educators lean into this cognitive dissonance that’s built into how they work with their students. #1 is essential to good teaching. Unless you are passionate about both the subject matter and the value of the subject matter, you will have a hard time convincing students to engage with […]
It’s essential to come back to yourself as often as possible. Every day, if you can, make a practice of returning to your center. What that practice is is not important. It could be yoga or meditation, but it might be a favorite song, or sitting at the piano, or […]
Being a diagnostician is an essential skill for growing artists. “I encourage young screenwriters, when I get a chance to talk to them, to be a diagnostician, too. When you see a movie, when you see an episode of television, and you don’t like it, don’t just shrug and say […]
Good practice mindset is knowing tomorrow won’t be different. Practice takes time. It takes repetition, and it takes repeated repetition. If you want to grow a skill, you will need practice – regardless of what the skill is. Along the way, your skill level today will almost always be indistinguishable […]
Why I’m wishing I was at the ACDA National Conference. Not for the amazing choral performances, which I wish I could hear. Not for the inspiring lectures, which I wish I could absorb. Not for the reading session, which would give me ideas for the future. No, I wish i […]
Get art as close as possible to its final form to hone the last 10%. I’m looking at a printed draft of our tour program for next month. After several hours over a couple of weeks cleaning it up in InDesign, I realized that I needed it on paper. There […]
My newest arrangement is now in print! “Castaways” is a great bossa nova tune that happens to be have been written for the Nick Jr. show The Backyardigans” in 2005. It later became a TikTok meme in 2021. I thought it had fantastic potential for a vocal jazz arrangement – […]
Fun and learning are not either/or. We’re taught pretty thoroughly – and consistently – in school that there are two tiers of behavior. There’s relaxed, fun, social behavior and there is serious, focused, studious behavior. The outcome is that students don’t know how to have fun while learning. They have […]