Laurel Black Music

A snob is anybody who takes a small part of you and uses that to come to a complete vision of who you are...that is snobbery... Now, the opposite of a snob is your mother. When I sat down to write this post I had originally planned to make a case for the detrimental effects of competitive environments on learning and performance. I've been searching through articles that cite case studies and listening to dozens of interviews by behavioral psychologists. But then I found this TED talk that basically sums up my philosophical questions about judgment and how the very nature of it sorts people into those that are successful and those that are failures.  Perhaps it is not so black and white, or so final, but there is a very tangible feeling of failure when there isn't a full scholarship with the acceptance letter, or an elimination in the competition, or a barricade presented from an audio round before  the actual competition takes place. (Yes, I've experienced all of thes...

In keeping with the idea of getting grounded from my last post in the Marimba Body series, let’s talk about hips and the sciatic nerve.  Hips are the joint where the leg meets the torso.   They're easy to find because they’re the widest part of our lower half, beneath the belly, but above the knees.  We use them to walk, run, dance, and reach the extreme ranges of the marimba.  Our hips make it easy for us to step far to the right to reach a high note or squat low so we can reach the extremes at the same time.  Without them, we couldn’t do either: we could play about a 3-octave range in the middle and that would be it! No, thank you! Holy Ilium, Batman! Just as there is no bone in the body actually called the “neck bone” or “knee bone,” so the name “hip bone” is a colloquial misnomer. (I know, who knew??)  What we refer to as hip bones are actually part of the pelvis: the ilium. If you’re like me and carried some kind of drum for yea...

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Next week on @ percussion we will chat all about competitions.  For episode 6 we invited Liz Galvan and Matt Penland in on the discussion, as they have "successful" competitions under their belts and, naturally, had different experiences. This session is well-timed - we recorded a few weeks ago - as it was right when I was in the midst of trying to figure out how to articulate whirling thoughts about competition, and more specifically, judgment.  We had great thought-provoking discussion, and decided, after an hour of talking, that judging is hard . Posts 1 and 2 of this Judgment series center on why that may be true, especially when our amazing brains work against us, shortcutting to biased pathways and rushed, incomplete opinions.  But what happens to our domain of classical percussion as a result of competition and the difficulties of judgment? From a practical point of view, judgment in music allows us to select the best players for orchestras, scholarships, o...