Posts tagged as:

fundamentals

Critical Thinking 101: Understanding Mutual Exclusion

November 3, 2011

(…or, Why The Drive-Through Habit Portends Terrible Critical Thinking) Since I teach high school students all over the United States, it’s pretty noticeable when they’re uniformly unfamiliar with something. For almost ten years I’ve been explaining to students from Boca to Toronto to Palm Springs the same term. I mean, every time it comes up [...]

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The Artist Interviews: Ned Canty, Opera Director

May 10, 2011

Ned Canty is a stage director with credits from companies such as Glimmerglass Opera, Wolf Trap Opera, Opera Theatre of St. Louis, Santa Fe Opera and New York City Opera. The New York Times has described his stage direction as having “a startling combination of sensitivity and panache,” and Opera News said, “The future of [...]

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David Sedaris on Tobias Wolf: Writers on Writing

May 4, 2011

A few weeks ago I went to see David Sedaris read some of his work at The Parker Playhouse in Fort Lauderdale. I’m a huge fan of personal essays (Sedaris and Bailey White are favorites) and listening to the radio programs “The Moth” and “This American Life.” I don’t consider myself an auditory learner by [...]

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Arts and Innovation: What’s Our Problem?

February 8, 2011

A few months ago I posted about the artist’s creative cycle, which was basically a diagram I developed to visually simplify the creative process. At the time I was thinking specifically about artists in the most traditional sense, and my goal was simply to chart (both for artists and less intuitively creative thinkers) what the [...]

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The Artist’s Creative Process

September 28, 2010
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Jazz and Fundamentals, Part 3: Improvisation

May 15, 2010

You’ve got to learn your instrument. Then, you practice, practice, practice. And then, when you finally get up there on the bandstand, forget all that and just wail. —Charlie Parker It’s often suggested that, with the evolution of technology and accessibility of information, we don’t really need to memorize fundamentals anymore. Why not outsource them? [...]

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Fundamentals and Jazz, Part 2: Connection

May 12, 2010

Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity. —Charles Mingus I love that: “Making the simple complicated is commonplace.” This gets me every time I read it because it’s so easy to think of jazz as really really complicated versions of simple songs. Isn’t that so? One might think [...]

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Fundamentals and Jazz, Part 1: Discipline

May 11, 2010

I’m into scales right now. —John Coltrane Fundamentals are the launching pad for expertise. Every field has them: they’re pieces of knowledge and practicable skills without which one cannot excel in a particular discipline. They’re conjugated verbs, times tables, and heavy machinery operating procedures. Most of us groan when think about teaching them or learning [...]

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