In both learning how to draw and how to play a musical instrument, the temptation is to start with the hand. Pick up a pencil,…

Left to Right: Pouya Hamidi (recording engineer extraordinaire), Timothy Kantor, Valerie Li, Adrian Fung, Eric Wong We just finished four long days of recording —…

The Power of Limitations “The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.” — Orson Welles It had been a whirlwind two weeks of work…

Fishing for Complements: A Clarifying Framework    Last week, I suggested that effective communication consisted of two elements:    Effective Communication = What You Say…

I was recently invited to speak and work with emerging professional musicians at a festival. While I continue to teach instrumental and chamber music in…

Conservatories have spent centuries perfecting how musicians play, but not how they speak. In my doctoral dissertation, I interviewed 12 internationally award-winning, entrepreneurial classical musicians.…

How We Misread Data: The Fentanyl Seizure Fallacy This article is written with a completely neutral political position. This post isn’t about whether fentanyl is…

There’s an old story about a psychologist who placed five monkeys in a cage with a ladder leading up to a bunch of bananas. The…

The Precedent Has Been Set  Though my goal this year is to write every day (and post at least three times a month), I’m already…

Do Something… ANYTHING! “… so we are doing everything we can.” This was the concluding statement in a meeting I once attended. The presenter had…

After an especially tricky lesson, a great cello teacher of mine once asked me why I played the cello. I regurgitated a line I heard…

I came up with the acronym/framework N.E.R.V.E. in 2018 when I was trying to figure out why I felt there was a similar shaped hole…