Your Will Will Be Done

I’m working on a new composition, a setting of The Lord’s Prayer for slovenly pirates and bellicose ne’er-do-wells. Or, I guess they just go by “Men’s Chorale”, but you get my point.
The Lord’s Prayers (the Matthew version, which all the cool kid use) is traditionally understood as 7 petitions:
“Our Father, who is in heaven,

Make holy [...]

Mourning Into Dancing

Ain’t no arranger like a former small group leader arranger!
All right, kiddos. It’s nostalgia time here on ye ole’ Addison Road blog. I wanted the summer small group to tackle something that was a little more “sport vocal” than their standard fair, something with a little movement, a little harmony to it. So, I [...]

Big Shoes to Phil

As of yesterday, I am the new Phil.
In a tense, embittered, deeply sectarian 30 second meeting with the Dean, I was officially made the Director of Music Technology for the APU School of Music. The position comes with, among other things, new business cards, and the long-sought respect of my peers that I so deeply [...]

How Michael Got His Groove Back

Thank god for the Yellowjackets. I was just barely hanging on until then.
The APU “A” Big Band played a gig last night for a few thousand people in the events center, and the pianist had a conflict, so I sat in. 30 tunes, all sight reading, with everything from thick-fisted George Shearing voicings to awkward [...]

A Short Survey of Interesting Topics

I have 7 students in my Music and Ethics class this semester. They’re just about cresting the first difficult climb in writing their thesis papers. They’ve done the bulk of the research, and had to turn in a full footnoted outline of their argument. All that’s left for most of them is to spill the [...]