After several months of careful consideration, I have decided to end The Reforming Trombonist blog. When I first started writing here twelve years ago, my work, family, and life situations were such that I could maintain a near-weekly writing schedule. I sustained that pace for quite a while, but over time my various responsibilities increased to the point that my posting here became too infrequent to sustain a regular and committed readership. Additionally, podcasts and various video platforms now occupy the space that was then dominated by blogs like this one, so interest is simply not as gr ..read more

Earlier this evening I sent the students in one of my low brass ensembles the parts to a couple of pieces we are now going to play on our concert later this spring. I say “now going to play” because these pieces were not part of my original plan; the original plan was to program considerably more difficult works. Having evaluated where we were after our most recent rehearsal and realizing that we had only five rehearsals remaining before the performance, I reluctantly concluded that the more challenging repertoire I had hoped to tackle was not going to be performance-ready in time. So, I decid ..read more

I taught my first university trombone lessons almost 23 years ago. I was then a 22-year-old teaching assistant with eight students, a fair amount of knowledge, and a greater amount of uncertainty. On the whole, I think I was an effective teacher then, and increasingly so when I started to move up the higher education “ladder,” first as a part-time adjunct instructor at age 24, a full-time instructor at age 25, and then onto the tenure track at age 26. I was awarded tenure for the first time at age 32, then again at 37 after changing schools, and finally reached full professor at age 44. Age 25 ..read more

Yesterday we had auditions for spring performing ensembles here at Ole Miss. As is usually the case with such things, there were some triumphs and some disappointments. A couple of people moved up quite a bit compared to the current seating, and a couple of people moved down, but for the most part things remained about the same. Well, except for one thing: on the whole, I thought that the overall level of playing increased markedly from the auditions for fall ensembles. This is extremely encouraging, and bodes well for the quality of playing we can expect from all of our performing groups next ..read more

C.S. Lewis (1898-1963) Clive Staples Lewis (1898-1963) was a brilliant author, scholar, thinker, and apologist for the Christian faith. His Chronicles of Narnia series, with its not-at-all-subtle Christ-figure in the great lion Aslan, is a beloved allegory, even though those “in the know” (myself included) might argue that his Space Trilogy is a far superior work of fiction. His apologetic works such as Mere Christianity and The Abolition of Man are truly brilliant; nevertheless, Lewis was not always a careful theologian so he must be read with some care. The end of the Narnia series, for exam ..read more

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