Latest Blog Posts

My excellent Samford student Chris Barbee pointed this article out to me about composer Jason Robert Brown’s confrontation of copyright abusers.   It is a long story, but many of you will find it fascinating.   Here is how it began: Four thousand copies of my music were being offered for “trade.” (I put “trade” […]

A UK Guardian article describes a study on the psychology of concert dress. First, four young, talented violinists were filmed playing the same music, dressed in three different outfits of varying levels of casualness. All these violinists were music students, from the top 10% of their year, and they were vetted to ensure comparability : […]

A recent ChoralBlog post by Philip Copeland discussed the changes to the publishing industry brought about by technology and accused music publishers of sticking with a 20th-century model. Many of the commenters to that thread suggested that the best solution would be self-publishing.   Without taking a stand on Philip's main point for the moment, […]

ACDA has gone digital with the National Honor Choirs for the Chicago conference.   The quick notes: teachers/conductors must be ACDA members they submit MP3's through the ACDA site to opusevent.com (sign into ACDA site first) Deadline is October 1 Most ACDA submissions come at the last second . . . don't let this be […]

Another great TED video that speaks about what we do:  

The American Guild of Organists, which has had a stodgy, hard-to-use website for years, recently unveiled a new version, which is much better. The job listings, based on JobTarget software, are especially easy to navigate, and they have the ability to post users’ resumes online for convenient trawling by employers. Employers have to pay a […]

Yesterday's rant on the stagnated music publishing model of today has an answer from one music publisher:  Graphite Publishing.   A few days ago, Timothy Takach from Graphite Publishing sent me an email telling me about his company.  Here is the history:   5 years ago, Jocelyn Hagen and I started a company called Graphite […]

It has been a pretty long time since I last blogged about the music publishing industry.  I have been frustrated with their paper-based economic business plan for sometime now and have blogged about it here, here, and here.   The music publishing is far too entrenched in the Gutenberg model and relies solely on the […]

For over a century it’s been considered settled law that one you have bought a copy of a copyrighted work, you own that copy and can resell it, give it away, or lend it. The Copyright Act of 1976 explicitly allows this. This allows libraries and used bookstores to thrive, and allows a much wider […]

When asked, “What are the three most important characteristics that a conductor possesses?” research tells us enthusiasm (26%), confidence (21%), and authority (17%) are the traits most highly valued by our singers.   As we enter our fall rehearsal schedules and start ramping up again with a fresh beginning, why not do an extreme makeover […]