|
|
|
Conducting the Music,
Not the Musicians
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
The Art of
Expressive Playing
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
 |
|
 |
|
Welcome to my website. Here you’ll find a list of my published compositions and
arrangements (including MP3 files of my latest works), details on my recently published texts,
plus my current schedule including teaching events and appearances with the Delaware
Valley Wind Symphony, New Jersey Saxophone Quartet, and Philadelphia Saxophone Quartet.
After 40 years of performing, teaching, composing and arranging, I recently documented my
insights and teaching methods in two published texts. Conducting the Music, Not the
Musicians (Carl Fischer, 2002) was co-written with my brother Henry and leverages the
insights of our teachers, Pablo Casals and Lucien Cailliet. Both were proponents of using
internal imagery to shape the conducting gestures needed to achieve expressive
performance. While covering the basics of conducting technique, this text remains focused on
teaching how clearly and eloquently conducted musical phrases leads to the most expressive
playing. As one reviewer remarked, our focus as conductors is on "expressing musical
phrases so clearly that the musicians find themselves naturally creating the phrases with us."
This explains our rationale for the title, “Conducting the Music, Not the Musicians”. The Art of
Expressive Playing (Carl Fischer, 2004) is the world's first and only comprehensive text book
on phrasing and expressive playing. Also co-written with Henry, it was designed to stimulate
imagery skills by focusing on the creative process that comes before the musician plays their
first note. Teaching the concepts in this series to students before they begin to learn repertoire
will lead to greater student creativity and will save you valuable rehearsal time by improving
your ensemble's performance.
Though I retired in 2005 from Bucks County Community College after 36 years, I'm busier than
ever. I'm now conductor of the Delaware Valley Wind Symphony, and still play regularly with
the New Jersey Saxophone Quartet and Philadelphia Saxophone Quartet. In 2007 I
contributed four arrangements and conducted the recording sessions on James Gafgen's new
CD, La Voce Romantica. In January of 2008 I completed my twenty-third season of teaching at
the Jerry Nowak Conducting Summer School in Sydney Australia on behalf of the Australia
Band and Orchestra Directors Association. And most recently, Kendor has published five new
charts of mine, including a three originals for their Jazz Journey Series.
|
|
|
