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My friend, Dr. Sarah Farr, got in touch with me in the Summer of 2022 to discuss writing some songs for developing voices. This set represents the second volume of an ongoing project. You can purchase it here: Songs for Developing Voices Volume II Each song is crafted...

“The squirrel feeds with difficulty,” is what “Mühsam ernährt sich das Eichhörnchen” means according to Google translate. I suppose they do, but what Germans mean when they say this phrase is much more akin to what English speakers mean when they say, “Rome wasn’t...

When I play for conducting class, I regularly hear the following: “We have a recording of the composer doing this piece, so we know what s/he wanted.” “The composer wrote this metronome marking, so we need to get pretty close to that.” “The composer was so precise in...

In a wonderful interview between Andre Previn and Oscar Peterson (you can watch it here),  the discussion — as it inevitably does between two jazz pianists — turns to Art Tatum. Peterson brings up a pianist he met once that played by taking everything from Tatum...

The term “fundamentalist” originates from that indefatigable wellspring of tuckermanity: the Presbyterian.  A business tycoon in the 1920s became concerned about the Princeton theological faculty and their affinity for recent German Biblical scholarship.  Deciding the...

This is a setting of Dorothy Sayers’ poem, “Christ the Companion.” The fabulous and redoubtable soprano, Alyssa Toepfer, sang it a few weeks ago at St. Paul’s on a Sunday morning. I originally wrote this piece for my friend, Donna Harler Smith. CHRIST THE COMPANION...