Fickle Ears

From the department of reinventing the wheel, here are newly cleaned up versions of some charts I like to use with young brass students. Lin...

I just saw a Craigslist post for a $9/hour security job that lists "critical thinking" as one of the required skills. Evidently it...

That's it for the month. Til next time.

The outer layer of the masculinity crisis, men's loss of economic authority, was most evident in the recessionary winds of the early nin...

It's time to start thinking endgame here, and there are indeed a couple of loose ends to be tied up concerning the gender discussion I o...

A few Blog Months ago, I attempted a post on "conditioning best practices for tuba players." I just revisited it and confirmed my ...

This year's foodblogging: kale and pasta salad with pinto beans and sauteed tempeh. INGREDIENTS (precise measurements customarily o...

#HANDSUP! – Outside the United States Courthouse, Los Angeles Today, being for the first time in years time-rich and excuse-poor at just t...

Today I listened, at his behest, to a very talented younger friend run down an upcoming classical trumpet audition. I have all but cut bait ...

I gave away my copy of Gladwell's Outliers after I finished it, so I'm writing from memory here, but the chapter about why poor kid...

The pretty decent guy who drives a Corvette, at being told that petroleum is a non-renewable resource: "Wow...I thought we could just...

I have written here before, at least in dribs and drabs, about all the things I don't have in common with people who come from a rock ba...

The Western orchestral tradition represents a pinnacle of human achievement, but the student-to-teacher ratio stinks. Where else but band cl...

This post is a protest against Operational Need; as in, "applicant must be able to work a flexible schedule depending on operational ne...

Today I had the pleasure of making a special trip to the Post Office in order to mail off some materials in support of a recent application....

In a moment of hubris which has become a yearly tradition, a certain white male blogger with pretensions to blog every day for a month recen...

The Question: if you don't care about the audience, why present your work publicly at all? The Answer: motivation; that is, to consoli...

If you play enough pick up basketball in enough different regions of this country, you will see and hear quite a few remarkable things, and ...

Another confession: over the last several years I have allowed myself to get sucked into the strange and beautiful world of more-than-casual...

I could easily have rolled this into yesterday's dispatch but thought it deserved its own entry: after almost exactly four mostly happy ...

I have a confession to make, again: contrary to what you might assume about someone having such a tough time "making it" as an art...

I recall countless high school classes where I sketched compositions during time allotted for a head start on that evening's devoirs . A...

As the seminal "sociobiological" account of the origins of many contemporary gender differences, anthropologist Lionel Tiger's...

I'm a man, but I can change, if I have to, I guess. (Man's Prayer, The Red Green Show ) Why pay such heed to Hanna Rosin and a...

It's telling that the popular saying "The customer is always right" is seldom uttered without a hint of sarcastic contempt. Th...