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Bring Your Music to Life

I had the privilege of conducting the Arizona All-State Band last month. The experience was extraordinary. One hundred students from schools throughout the state participated after going through several steps to qualify.

For the Love of Music

As I moved from room to room among the hundreds of music teachers at a recent Music Educators Conference in Arizona, I thought about the tremendous passion and commitment that brought all of these people to this profession—teaching music for a living.

What’s Really Happening in the Music Classroom?

There are many who wonder what really happens in a music classroom. What can be gained from this time spent when there is so much else to learn to create a successful life?

Just Do It

Musicians, painters, dancers, sculptors, and actors know that the artistic process requires you to keep at it—to constantly create and maintain momentum.

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A Matter of Interpretation

An artist’s interpretation—representation of a thought, a scene, an event, or an object—might be in the form of sound, video, painting, drama, dance, or sculpture.

Singing the Blues

Color is an essential part of how we experience the physical, aesthetic, and cultural aspects of our world. So it’s not a coincidence that artists use visual or aural color to evoke certain emotions or responses in their works.

A Beautiful Ruined Moment

Everything was beautiful. The performance was exhilarating. At the final chord, the conductor motioned for everyone to end what was to be a resounding and reverberating conclusion to the “Hallelujah Chorus” from Handel’s Messiah, but wait—something was wrong.

Abracadabra

Conductors’ batons cast a type of spell, but not in the Harry Potter sense. They create and control a form of magic when used to lead a band or orchestra. Many people love to watch conductors wave the baton—it certainly looks like magic because it appears that with a simple wave of a “wand,” the musicians obey your every wish and the music soars easily.

Sliding Out of Third

What is going on back there? I was in middle of playing an important solo passage when I noticed movement and whispers coming from behind and below—we were on risers a couple of feet off the main floor of the stage.

Duck!

I was recently sitting in the audience watching a wind quintet concert on stage. As the music began, I found my mind wandering back through my own experiences and there I was back in college playing bassoon in the honors wind quintet. We were enjoying our performance, communicating expertly with a nod here and there, a movement of the body to reach the next emphasis in unison, and connecting to the audience as if we were one instrument.