I felt it this week when I pulled on my teal Columbia fleece jacket for our morning walk. I noticed it in the cluster of red leaves at the top of the Maple tree on the corner and the baskets of Zestar apples (my favorite) at the farmer's market.
And then Wegmans had a sample of cornbread with hot honey on Saturday morning and all I could think about was a big bowl of Taco Soup and weekend football games (Go Dawgs! Go Bills! 🏈).
Copyright.
It's a sticky subject and one not often taught in music school.
Copyright law protects anything with intellectual property rights. This includes poetry, books, photographs, art, song lyrics, music, and more.
How does it affect what you do as a musician, teacher, freelancer, artist, or small business owner? What do you need to know?
It's one the greatest musical skills you can help your choir develop: singing and reading music for themselves with musical understanding.
Just like learning to read language, music-reading comes after listening and interacting with music aurally and developing a musical vocabulary of tonal and rhythm patterns (these are like words in language).
Think of how you learned to read: You probably spent a lot of time following along in a book as you listened to someone else read to you. Eventually, you started finishing the sentences and pointing to the words as you went along.
You learned simple words like, go and dog and identified them in other books.
Learning to read music is no different. We learn to recognize tonal and rhythm patterns like familiar words in books.
I love working with beginning piano students.
Our lessons are always full of imagination and creative exploration—their eyes wide with excitement and wonder when they make a connection or discover something new—and I always learn so much about myself as a teacher as we walk those first steps in their musical journey together.
That being said, we all know that when learning a new instrument, productive practice time at home is essential to learning and developing as a musician.
Most of us see our beginning students for only 30 minutes a week, so time spent at the keyboard in between lessons can really make or break a student’s progress and the fulfillment they find in music-making.
The Olympics Primetime coverage has been a nightly ritual in our house these past few weeks—the Women’s 1500m Freestyle (go, Katie Ledecky!), the Men’s pommel horse routines (go, Stephen Nedoroscik!), and of course, Women’s Gymnastics (go, Simone Biles and Suni Lee!).
All of it is impressive—the vault, the floor routines, the high bars—but the balance beam routine takes me right back to grade-school gymnastics classes…
SCENE: World of Gymnastics, Thursday afternoon class, early 1990s
I'm wearing a light pink leotard with silver polka dots. I stare down at my bare feet on the blue mat, then peer around the shoulders of my classmates ahead of me in line to see a camel-brown balance beam that's taller than I am.
Today, we're doing cartwheels on the balance beam.
'Tis the season to be jolly (in July, as you plan music for Advent!)
Am I right?!
As a church musician, you know it's never too early to be thinking about Christmas, so today, I thought I'd share a few favorite choral anthems for the Advent season.
I've mentioned a few of these in previous posts (Favorite Anthems for the Small Church Choir and Fifty More Favorite Anthems for the Small Church Choir), but I thought it might be helpful to compile everything in one post for easy reference.
Are you looking for books you can sing or chant in your elementary music classes, group classes in your studio, or children’s choir rehearsals?
You know the ones: books that either have lyrics to a familiar children’s song or hymn, or stories with text that can be sung to a familiar tune, like “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.”
Last week, we celebrated Independence Day here in the U.S. 🇺🇸
We went canoeing with Rory, I made a red, white, and blue charcuterie platter, and we reflected on the meaning of freedom, democracy, and independence and how this plays into our work as musicians and teachers.
Franklin was a Founding Father of the United States, signing the Declaration of Independence, the Treaty of Paris, and the U.S. Constitution. There's also the famous story of flying a kite in a thunderstorm with a key attached to test his theory of electricity. 🔑
But it turns out there's a lot more to learn.
What does it mean to be a leader? And what does it take to be a great one?
Leadership has been defined as “the art of motivating a group of people to act towards achieving a common goal.” (source) Thus, a leader is one who inspires and directs that collective action.
This requires a certain set of skills and character traits, though experts say you can learn and develop these skills with time and experience.
You don’t have to be born with all of these skills and traits to be a great leader.
I climbed onto the stage, my black patent leather Mary Jane’s clacking across the hardwood floor. I sat down at the Kawai piano and placed my hands in C position. I was performing “A Short Story” from Suzuki Piano School, Vol. 2, which my teacher said was a challenging recital piece (I refused to listen).
I was 10 and perhaps overly confident because as I entered the final section, I caught a glimpse of the audience. The stage lights were bright and the room was dark—too dark to see anyone’s faces, thankfully, but it was impossible to miss the steady red light of the shoulder-mount camcorder my dad had perched on his left shoulder (remember those??).
