War is seldom justified, and guaranteed to result in at least as much inhumanity as politico-branded triumph and righteousness. On this Veterans Day, I do not celebrate war, or the mechanisms that cause it, nor the facile arguments about it.…
So I moved to Minneapolis. My heart is still sore from leaving my DC students and colleagues (heck, I still miss my LA folks every. single. day.) but I’m immersing myself in the business at hand until the ache…
The artistic endeavor seems like the kind of thing that should just flow. The story goes like this: big feels, inspiration strikes, she works late into the night in a torrent of creativity and as dawn breaks somewhere over the…
In the third installment of this series, I’m going to encourage you to do something fairly radical: pay much MUCH more attention to your bow during your practice. Favor it. Examine it. Look to it as the cause of 80%…
If we think about the relationship between you and your instrument as a romance, practice can be seen as courtship. You’re getting to know about the cello, finding out about yourself, and making your intentions known. You want this…most ardently. …
The goal of this series is to provide you with several small changes in approach, presented one at a time, that will streamline and improve your practice process, while also reminding you that MXC* was perhaps the only worthwhile programming…
Image: Carlos Serrao. On a similar note to the previous post, I’m sure I’m not the only teacher who gets emails asking what people should do when they really want to play the cello but can’t afford a teacher.…
I get several emails a week from students asking whether they should buy cello A or cello B, although cello C is lovely and has a single-piece back, here have a look at this picture, would a serial number help?…
It can be argued that any reader/writer relationship revolves around a transaction. The writer offers an insight, or shares an experience, or somehow provides new context for something the reader is working through. The reader places value in what has…
I’ve been playing twice a day for about twenty minutes each sitting. It hurts afterward, but so does PT, so I figure as long as it doesn’t linger too long, I’m safe. I savor every note, and am grateful…