While the David Concertino is a signature piece for advanced trombonists, Guilmant’s Morceau Symphonique is at least as ubiquitous for younger players. Nearly every trombonist plays this piece either in high school or the first couple years of college — which is a particularly formative period in the educational process. Because of the singularly important place this piece occupies […]

I am excited to announce that I will be offering a lecture at the upcoming 2018 International Trombone Festival. My presentation will be titled “Jazz Pedagogy for Classical Repertoire.” This is the abstract as it was accepted by the Festival: Current trombone degree plans often specialize in either “jazz” or “classical” repertoire, and require students […]

I’m writing this post as my Music Appreciation class takes an exam. With the quiet time to think about the class as a whole, I started to wonder why we don’t teach it to music majors. The way most appreciation courses are taught, much of the material is duplicated in musicology courses designed for majors, […]

Here’s an interesting game: pick your nine favorite symphonies without repeating a composer, and with each symphony sequentially numbered in a conventional sense. Prokofiev 1: Elegantly constructed. As close to Bach as I can get in this list, since he didn’t write conventionally numbered symphonies Brahms 2: Efficient motivic development makes this (and Brahms’s other […]