Latest Blog Posts

In the late Peter Drucker’s book Management Challenges for the 21st Century, the management guru and former Marie Rankin Clarke Professor of Social Science and Management at Claremont Graduate University, stated, “Most people think they know what they are good at. They usually are wrong.” Drucker continues, “More often, people know what they are not […]

She thought she was all alone . . .   While talking with a newly-minted choral music teacher about the initial couple weeks in her first job, it soon became all-too apparent that she was the only music teacher in that school.  Sadly, she was already feeling lonely.  Rather than being surrounded by other choral […]

I know I'm beating a drum that no one's listening to, but I'm not the only one who thinks copyright protections are way too long. Short version: Remember all the good old Disney movies? Yeah, all of them came from works no longer under copyright protection at the time. The whole of the Disney Empire […]

Elementary music blogger Amy Burns makes a ten point list about the things she is happy about with the start of school.  A few are listed here, see the others on her site.   Amy’s list: Concert planning. I adore planning for the upcoming concerts with listening and playing through some wonderful songs.  Singing. My […]

In case you haven’t heard, MENC (Music Educators National Conference” changed it’s name to NAME (National Association for Music Education) on September 1, 2011.   Here is part of the announcement: One of the world’s oldest and largest arts education organizations enters a new chapter in its distinguished history today when it officially assumes the […]

Research shows that teaching to different “learning styles” doesn’t help.   Music is featured in this story (at about the 3 minute mark in the story that lasts a little over four minutes):   The NPR story.    

Recently, Honduras President Porfirio Lobo banned cell phones at all of his meetings, complaining that it was “a lack of courtesy” that the phones are ringing and beeping during the weekly two-hour Cabinet meeting.   One of my colleagues counts people as absent if he sees a person texting in class.   Another person has […]

From an interested ChoralNet user who wishes to remain anonymous:    You live in a very small country that has been invaded, occupied, and controlled for decades, in fact centuries. For a brief period in the twentieth century, from 1918 until 1940, your country was free and independent, but then terror struck again. During the […]

I follow a number of tech blogs, podcasts and news publications.   One prominent website, GigaOM, recently featured “Inkling,” a new e-reader for college textbooks.  I was pleased to see music featured prominently in the video demonstration of the program.     The video wouldn’t load properly on the ChoralBlog, so check it out here. […]

Orbiting the Giant Hairball by Gordon MacKenzie draws on the author’s leadership at the Hallmark corporation, and describes how MacKenzie occasionally was able to escape the gravitational pull of stifling corporate bureaucracy, enabling him and those he worked with to achieve a state of creative achievement by “orbiting” the corporation. The author builds a metaphor […]