Last night I watched and thoroughly enjoyed the “What is Sonata Form?” episode from Leonard Bernstein’s Young People’s Concert series.
As a rudimentary explanation of sonata form for grade school kids, it presented little that I did not already know about the basics concept of exposition, development, and recapitulation.
Two things were quite shocking about it for [...]

Yesterday at the gym, while attempting to gather material for this blog, I created an extended moment of low comedy for myself.
I had wanted to get a picture of the weight machine’s computer screen that cautions me approximately 400 times a workout to “try to slow down.” [See my first blog entry if you're confused.]
I [...]

In yesterday’s post I wrote about some of the differences between my project and Julie Powell’s but today another even more obvious one occurs to me:  how do I know when I’m done?
She had both a time goal and an activity goal:  cook all the recipes in MASTERING THE ART OF FRENCH COOKING in a [...]

Having just seen JULIE & JULIA, the comparisons between our projects seem obvious I suppose, but as much as I enjoyed the movie (and loved Meryl) the differences struck me as greater.
Much of the credit for this blog goes to my great friend and frequent creative collaborator Leslie Lewis Sword. I told her I [...]

I am a failure as a pianist. At least, that’s what I’ve considered myself for years.
I took piano lessons from grade school through college and even for a while as an adult.
Even though I suppose I progressed appropriately, my awareness of what was lacking in my playing also grew proportionally. IE, the more [...]