I have made some valuable upgrades to my setup over the past year that I’d recommend to other conductors trying to make their setup more useful when trying to juggle technology old and new, i.e. scores and pencils AND monitors and mice.

As the artist Marcel Duchamp famously said, the spectator completes the work. The audience is our final and most important collaborator. And in the artists’ communication with the audience, we can discover opera’s true anti-elite potential.

–Yuval Sharon: A New Philosophy of Opera

According to Klein, humans have at least 9 grand Sources of Power. They include storytelling, metaphor, and intuition. They also include rationality (Kahneman’s more deliberate “System 2”), although in highly dynamic environments where time is short and information is imperfect, rationality quickly falls apart. And, over long stretches, rationality gets tired while intuition remains.

“our comments in rehearsal are there to help orient the player, not merely towards what is happening in the moment, the Kairos, but what that moment says about motion”

Expertise can cause two opposing tendencies in grade 2 literature:

1. The technical details of the music can become totally transparent - I can effortlessly supply needed advice to every level of musician.

2. The musical meaning can become totally opaque: this music is so easy relative to my own skill that it's hard to see its inherent value.

Bottom line: If you are an orchestral brass player enjoying the sounds in front of you, you are already poised to enter late.

“the combination of a relentless quest for growth, combined with a desire to create meaningful, enjoyable performance experience that exhibits many qualities, including self-forgiveness”

Music sits at the mouth of the river. It is the source, the way, the Tao… The organization must be built around a common love for the joy of excellent orchestral repertoire, performed at the highest artistic level.

Happy New Year! Reading books seemed to fall out of fashion for a time, but every signal seems to show an increased appetite for reading, and there are plenty of great books out there to feed the minds of conductors who want to hone their rehearsal technique. Here are five I’ve read recently that are worth your time.

...There are quite a few other techniques that I would broadly lump broadly into this category. Each could have their own essay, and some already do. Here are a few examples:

• Knowing when to stop and fix something.

• Knowing how to prioritize between competing priorities.

• Knowing when to move on from a passage.

• Knowing when practicing under- or at-tempo would be (in)effective....

"these differences are equally plain, yet only to those who have been initiated by practical work."

Simon Rattle rehearses the choir and orchestra of the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra as they get ready for a performance of Haydn’s Creation. This brief clip demonstrates rehearsal instructions centered choral diction around a brief passage in Haydn’s Creation. The frequent stopping and starting indicates rare high-quality footage of a professional organization engaged in a true detail rehearsal, not merely a dress rehearsal run-through.

A list of some of the music sites and sources I read.

"And being a role model means that there are going to be members of your family, people who live in your neighborhood, your classmates who watch you, and say, 'Oh! That's how it's done!'"

“The key thing to be aware of is that noticing what the problem is, and knowing why it is happening, are both separate skills from being able to prescribe a solution.”

Edmondson gives four characteristics of an Intelligent Failure

1. The failure takes place in a novel situation.

2. The context “presents a credible opportunity to advance toward a desired goal.”

3. Due dilligence (practice, preparation, research, deliberate process, etc.) is undertaken….

…while removing context can cut away the unimportant, it also runs the risk of cutting away the glue that holds the music together in the first place.

“….taking the elevator down another level.”

“Pearson has managed a feat here by succinctly building on Klein’s earlier definition but expanding it to include a range of conscious activity that can be performed on and around the unconscious activity. Malcolm Gladwell famously called our subconscious ‘the locked door,’ but on Pearson’s account, there might be a few ways to slide some paper under the door, or to put an ear to the door for some helpful signals.”