Lost and Found Oakland Beer Garden
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Body Mapping in New York
I’m back home in warm, sunny Long Beach, CA after 8 days of teaching in New York City. Like all of my visits to NYC, it was a full and fabulous trip. I always leave feeling refreshed, grateful, exhausted, and inspired. The turbulent six hour flight home Friday night, without Wi-Fi, provided me with plenty…
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Becoming process oriented vs outcome oriented
I recently decided to get back on the horse and take a big national orchestral audition. It had been a couple of years, and it was time. I’ve taken many professional auditions over the years, 44 to be exact. For a student, that might seem like a lot, but it really isn’t when you think…
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Feeding our souls with the stuff that matters
So, here I am, camped out on the floor at SFO, next to an outlet, with a big cup of breakfast tea. It’s not hard to reflect back on the awesome, exhausting, inspiring, rejuvenating, soul feeding 12 days that just took place; a week on the Oregon Coast, opera in San Francisco, and a shiny…
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Collaborating, Sharing, Laughing, Trusting … & drinking great craft beer
I just returned home from four incredibly full days in Portland, OR at the Andover Educators Biennial Conference. Our AE conferences are a wonderful opportunity to all come together, break bread, share ideas, and learn from one another. I always come away from them feeling refreshed, inspired, grateful, and full of great new information. Here…
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Surrounded By Inspiration
The past couple of weeks have been a whirlwind of inspiration. I’m talking about life-changing inspiration. As with all of my blog posts, I toss ideas around for awhile, often jotting down notes or leaving myself voice memos over several days before I actually sit down and write. I’ve been thinking a lot about the…
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“Life is a journey, not a destination.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson
In the spirit of commencement week at CSULB, I got to thinking about all of the different paths our graduates may explore as they embark on the next chapter of their lives. It also got me thinking about the many winding roads I’ve been on that have led me to where I am at this…
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Getting out of our own way
Why is it when faced with a tricky passage in music we grip our instruments tighter? Do we think this is going to magically help us to play with greater accuracy? Or how about when we need to really project in a loud section; why grip here? It’s not technical. Yet the keys get squeezed…