March 2016 archive

Texture: Finding Character and Story in Music

One of the first classes I signed up for in college was Music Appreciation, and my professor was truly a gifted teacher. Every week he would bring his large collection of instruments to class and use them to demonstrate musical concepts that would have been abstract and disembodied otherwise. Words like timbre and tempo, major and minor, chord and cadence, […] Read more…

Integrating Technique: A Natural Approach

Recently, while assisting another teacher in a beginning tango class, the students I was working with were trying close embrace for the first time. The teacher prompted them to find a comfortable hug, then gradually introduced variations to make the embrace work for tango. Both of the students I was working with started with a very comfortable […] Read more…