Cellist and Writer
It’s not easy being a school music teacher. I don’t know this from personal experience, because all my teaching experience has been in universities and my own private studio. But as hard as I work, I’ve never experienced the daily stress of having to defend my own job against a board of education that believes a subject is only worth studying if it’s directly applicable to the needs of the job market.
Continue reading “What music is for”
This morning, as my dog and I were jogging behind my daughter while she rampaged up and down a bike trail near our house on her Doc McStuffins bicycle, I started wondering if I’d been right to teach her to ride using training wheels.
Training wheels do exactly one thing: balance the bicycle so the child doesn’t fall off.
Which is the one thing they need to do themselves once the training wheels come off.
Continue reading “The Illusory Promises of Training Wheels”
Well, it’s been quite a week. My last post, “Disarmed: Dropping the Protective Armour of Stage Fright,” went kind of viral. I’d been writing this blog for five years for a small audience, and then suddenly my readership was in the tens of thousands.
Continue reading “Stage Fright Is A Troll (And Other Observations)”
Is there a musician alive who hasn’t experienced the sabotaging interior conflict of stage fright?
There might be a lucky few. I’m not one of them.
In my career as a cellist and a professor of cello, I’ve noticed something happening again and again. A performance–my own or someone else’s–is going reasonably well, and then an unexpected mistake changes everything. It might be a wrong note, a badly missed shift, a momentary memory lapse.
In the split second after the mistake, things can go two ways.
Continue reading “Disarmed: Dropping the Protective Armour of Stage Fright”