“To be a musician in the service of music is not a job; it is a way of life.” –Isaac Stern, violinist The Musician’s Way, p. 299 The music education community is swirling with talk about how best to prepare university-level students for modern-day careers....
Chapter 2 of The Musician’s Way spells out deep practice principles and provides frameworks that get fleshed out throughout the text. The individual sections are titled: Practicing Deeply Habits of Excellence Essentials of Artistic Interpretation Mental Imaging...
This is the first of periodic posts in which I summarize how I use The Musician’s Way in my studio teaching. Here, I focus on Chapter 1. My class of guitar students at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts includes graduate and undergraduate students as...
Why write about music and musical expertise? Is it as abstruse as that old saw – “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture” – would lead us to believe? In the Preface to The Musician’s Way, I wrote, “Words are destined to fall short when it comes to...
“The real reason that I haven’t performed live for a long time is that I have very severe hearing damage.” -Pete Townshend The Musician’s Way, p. 277 True story: A percussion professor was concerned about the sound levels at his music school, so he...
To make music in groups, we require more than interpretive and technical know-how; we also need specific skills if we’re to work together harmoniously. Given that aspiring performers spend so much time practicing alone, are most acquiring expert collaborative skills?...
Welcome to The Musician’s Way Blog. In this, my inaugural post, I want to explain in a few words my motivation for writing my book The Musician’s Way, creating MusiciansWay.com, and launching this blog. I took up the pen and carved out a corner of cyberspace to help...
