A Devil to Play, but Watch the Plagiarism Please

A method for guiding students on their learning path. In When Humans Need a Nudge Toward Rationality author Jeff Sommer reports on an interesting principal — something I would call “nudge theory”– as described in a new book titled Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness by Richard Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein. The [...]

We had a guest artist at ASU yesterday, Lydia Van Dreel from the University of Oregon, who presented a great master class to the horn studio. At the end of the hour I had her bring up something that she mentioned to me before the class that she had her students do recently at Oregon. [...]

NOTE: SEE UPDATE AT END OF POST. Over the weekend I saw a link to an article on a performance of the Brahms trio posted on the NPR website. I am a tough audience for this type of article, especially so as about ten years ago I actually worked up a pretty extensive article on [...]

Springfield—KYTV’s horn player has decided to quit the show. Harry Pally, who played the main theme song music for local TV station KY3 for decades has quit citing lack of recognition and a bad case of “terrible boredom”. “Every morning show, every noon, every evening, each news break, day after day after day. It starts [...]

One classic publication I have come back to recently is Preparatory Melodies to Solo Work for French Horn edited by Max P. Pottag. This is a great publication for the moderately advanced student–melodic, short, with some challenges–and I have recently come back to it in my personal practice. It was a book my first major [...]

Reflections from the past week. Gunther Schuller From a regional section of the New York Times, I discovered that Gunther Schuller actually did some conducting on Miles Davis’ landmark album Birth of the Cool, in addition to playing horn. Schuller recently adopted some of that recording’s material for a new jazz nonet. What is a [...]