This November, Stuart Saunders Smith is being posthumously inducted into the Percussive Arts Society Hall of Fame, survived and accompanied by his wife Sylvia Smith. The Smith’s collective contribution to the percussive arts through pedagogy, composition,...
November 26th, 2024, 12:30 PM I have lunch with Robert McCormick, who suggests for the thousandth time that I should return to school and pursue a Doctor of Musical Arts, both to open up a pathway to collegiate teaching and develop a new collection of artistic...
A surprise Sonder in video format! On my last tour with the World Percussion Group, I presented a talk on Performance Psychology as we visited schools and conservatories in England, Spain, and Portugal. I have long suffered from mental struggles in performance, and...
In an early morning lesson, Fall of my sophomore year, my professor told me to learn the fugue in g-minor from Bach’s 1st violin sonata. I happily obliged and began my work on the piece that very afternoon, heading to the library to pick up both the piece and,...
Eight schools over three years. Flights, drives, and zoom calls. 2 am practice sessions. Emails, audition deposits, admissions seminars. Forgetting to turn the snares off, missed notes on Porgy, whiffed ruffs on Kijé. Welcome to my search for a master’s program....
This blog has been incredibly cathartic for me during the year. It has given me the opportunity to refine the tangle of thoughts I have rolling around in my head into tangible threads. With that clear mind comes the realization that I don’t have a limitless supply of...
