In November 1989, when the Berlin Wall was opened, I was a student living in Budapest, Hungary. This is a little slice of life from those days.

Within a few days of the Berlin Wall opening on November 9th, 1989, I was on an overnight train from Budapest to Berlin to check out the scene. But I was removed from the train in the middle of the night at the border between Hungary and what was then Czechoslovakia. The “Velvet Revolution” in Prague wasn’t scheduled to happen for another week, and I found out the hard way that they were…

There is a bit of folklore out there (hopefully apocryphal) about a disagreement between two college-level Music Theory teachers that turned into a fist fight. No, no one insulted anyone’s wife or ancestral homeland. The stakes were way higher than that: it was about what’s the correct way to notate the Cadential 6/4 chord. One adamantly believed it should be notated as I 6/4 (obviously with the 6 vertically stacked above the 4) and the other insisted it should be V 6/4.

Who Was Right?

I know better than to go near that question, but let’s take a look at what this chord…

“…exceptionally beautiful on many counts!”

This month marks the 20th anniversary of what perhaps remains my favorite of the pieces I’ve composed over the years.

Cycle of Friends, for soprano, chorus (SATB and sometimes SATB+SATB) and chamber orchestra, is a lush, emotional journey through five texts taken from such diverse sources as Tang Dynasty poetry of China, Sappho and Emily Dickinson, each dealing in its own way with the universal theme of friendship.

The word tritone is frequently used interchangeably with the terms augmented fourth and diminished fifth. Let’s see if we can clear that up.

The intervals of the augmented fourth and diminished fifth indeed sound the same when played out of context on a piano, but they are not the same interval, they are not both the same thing as a tritone, and the tritone is not an inversion of itself.

The word tritone can be broken down to something like “three tones.” A major second, or whole step, is a tone. In music theory nerd circles, a major third, which…

I once saw a YouTube video of a dog demonstrating perfect pitch. A lovely Golden Retriever sat at what looked to be a makeshift, paw-friendly piano keyboard . Opposite and off screen, a woman played a penny whistle and addressed the dog in German. The woman would play a pitch on the whistle, inviting the dog to play the corresponding note on its doggy keyboard. Without fail, the dog would play the correct pitch on the keyboard, even making distinctions among octaves. …

For years I have taught private lessons to people, mostly adult amateur choral singers, who approach me seeking to improve their “sight singing.” With the singular goal of “sight singing” in mind, my students often don’t immediately realize that the ability to sing music off the page at sight depends on the mastery of a combination of skills and some music theory. The umbrella term for this mastery is “Musicianship”

Anyone who has studied music at a conservatory or college level has taken some form of Musicianship class, although it’s sometimes called “Aural Skills”, “Ear Training” or just “Solfège”. This…

Well, now I have Lithuania to add to the list of countries whose folk music to be obsessed with. In a discussion with a Moscow-trained teaching colleague about what folk music traditions might have influenced Stravinsky’s ear in his youth, I brought up the amazing vocal music of the Caucasus region, particularly Georgian table songs. My colleague agreed, and then went on to alert me to several others from within Russia and the former Soviet Union, including Lithuanian sutartinės.

Sutartinės are little polyphonic vocal gems performed by two, three or four singers. Melodies generally consist of little repeating figures, usually…

My college teacher, mentor and great friend ever since then, Seán Deibler passed away on August 19th. Most of what is important enough to me to write about on this blog can, in one way or another, be traced back to my 24-year association with him. He was a conductor, a singer, a clarinetist, a composer, a teacher, a motivational speaker, a clown, a therapist… The list goes on, and what’s really exceptional is that he was phenomenal at all of the above.