A high school band director in my state reached out to me recently and asked if I would contribute to a project compiling advice from university faculty members on what prospective music majors on their instruments should know and be able to do before beginning their degree programs. I think he mainly wanted lists of skills and competencies that such students should have, and I have included those as an appendix to this article, but even more important than these lists are broader ways of thinking about music and music making that lead to success, which I have organized into the following fift ..read more

Now that I am just a little bit into my third decade of college low brass teaching, I have long since discovered that my uses of pop culture references to illustrate concepts often fall flat. While at the beginning of my career I was close enough in age to my students that we could identify with a lot of shared references, now that I am much closer to their parents’ age (sometimes older!) I usually have to explain myself when trying to use some pop culture artifact to convey a musical or technical concept. Often I decide that this isn’t worth the time and find some other illustration, but rece ..read more

Remington singing while conducting a trombone choir rehearsal. Emory Remington (1891-1971) was one of the twentieth century’s foremost trombone pedagogues. Over the course of several decades as trombone professor at the Eastman School of Music, he built a program that produced dozens of orchestral trombonists, performers in other genres, and university professors, including one of my teachers, Dr. Edward R. Bahr (b. 1941). Remington’s development of the “balanced daily routine” for playing fundamentals practice is so synonymous with his name that countless band directors and students refer reg ..read more

I have been a Star Wars fan for really all of my adult life. As part of the “Star Wars Generation,” I grew up with a passing familiarity with and enjoyment of the original trilogy, but became more familiar with it as a teenager, first through video games and even a Dungeons and Dragons-type roleplaying game set in the Star Wars universe, and later through the Special Editions of the original trilogy released in theatres in the mid-90s. Since then, I have found the various Star Wars media—including movies, television, novels, and games—to be a type of easy escapism. They are not great literatur ..read more

This past March I presented a recital of music for trombone, euphonium, and tuba with piano by Scandinavian composers. Entitled “Due North,” the program highlights some lovely music by composers that are perhaps “off the beaten path” a bit, yet from a part of the world that has produced some very fine low brass music over the years. This was the first complete solo program I had performed since 2019, as pandemic restrictions prevented my doing so for over two years. The program went relatively well and was well-received, the only disappointment being that I did not receive the recordings until ..read more

When I started this blog ten (!) years ago I found it considerably easier to write frequently (usually weekly) than I do now. The change is mainly due to my son, who was two then and family life centered around the home, with my wife staying home with him full time. Now he is twelve and has numerous activities that require our time and attention, and Mrs. Everett has long since returned to teaching music herself. Add to that a steadily increasing slate of responsibilities at church, and my ability to sit and write “for fun” has declined precipitously. Nevertheless, I enjoy writing here and int ..read more

As a child of the 80s (okay, born in the very late 70s, but I don’t remember any of it), I am increasingly convinced that I grew up in the best time to ever be a kid. The internet was not yet a reality in most households (perhaps thankfully), but we had cable television and plenty of great cartoons, and even though most of those cartoons were basically 22-minute toy commercials, we had a ball watching them. Despite the only thinly-veiled profit motive behind their production, most cartoons of the time had at least a working moral compass with an obvious dichotomy between good and evil (He-Man ..read more

One of the first articles posted on this blog back in 2012 was a list of Fifteen Steps to Playing a Better All-State Audition. That piece was so popular and, I believe, so important that I have reposted it yearly in the early fall. Because auditions for college and university music programs typically occur in the spring, it is appropriate for a comparable article on that subject to appear at this time of year. All of the items listed in that previous article apply equally to college and university auditions, so I have repeated only a few of them here in cases where some targeting to a differen ..read more

Earlier this evening I had a nice discussion with my son about some of the ideas covered in this article. It has been several years since it was published and I have not had time to write something new recently, so I thought a re-post might be in order. Thanks for reading. While this blog is dedicated primarily to my teaching and performing work as a brass player, over the nearly four years of writing here I have enjoyed occasionally writing about my views on various aspects and implications of the Christian faith. Today I want to briefly step back and write about something even more fundament ..read more

This past summer, my colleague Dr. Michael Wilkinson from the University of South Carolina and I were able to bring our multi-instrument “Insanity Brass Duo” program to the International Trombone Festival. While time limitations forced us to shorten our program slightly, removing movements from the Telemann and Shostakovich works and eliminating repeats from the Marcello, we had a great time performing for an enthusiastic audience. We did get a very nice recording from the event, but it arrived in the middle of the fall semester, and I have only now had free time available to edit the video in ..read more