Why Passion Doesn’t Save Music Education: An Australian Reflection
If change in music education is to occur, musicians may need to do something profoundly uncomfortable.
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Category: Essays
Recordings Changed How We Experience Music
When music can always be heard, it no longer has to be longed for.
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Why the Orchestra Became Art and the Wind Band Did Not
If the wind band is ever to possess a living canon, it may be found in the music that history never allowed to stay still long enough to be heard.
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Imperia Corrupta Cadunt: When Protest Comes From Within
The Latin phrase Imperia corrupta cadunt — corrupt empires fall — is not prophecy. It is history, repeated often enough that it should no longer surprise us.
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Programming Is Not Neutral: Conductors, Courage, and the Music We Choose Not to Perform
Programming – what we place on the stand, what we ask musicians to rehearse, and what we present to the public are never accidental decisions.
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Taste, Emotion, and the Listener’s Journey
Taste without emotion is sterile; emotion without taste is naïve. Together, they make music not just heard, but lived.
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Funeral Marches and the Sublime: from fear to catharsis
When François-Joseph Gossec unveiled his Marche lugubre in 1790, he transformed a functional piece of ceremonial music, funeral marches, into an overwhelming aesthetic experience.
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Taste, Emotion, and the Conductor’s Dilemma
Taste without emotion is sterile; emotion without taste is naïve. Together, they form the art of conducting.
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“Old Rubbish”? Why Wind Band Music Has No Museum
Wind band music is one of the last great frontiers of musicological recovery. It is fragmented, scattered, and often difficult to decode—but it is there. And it is waiting.
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The Least Criticised of All Musical Genres
We have plenty of sound. What we need now is soul — and criticism involves the courage to ask whether the music we’re playing deserves to be played.
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