It’s An Honor

On Thursday, The Kennedy Center announced its honorees for 2015, giving America its annual gift of cultural whiplash (the above photo is an excellent example). Representing classical music will be Seiji Ozawa, longtime music director of the Boston Symphony, along with...

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Thank You For Your Service

As some readers know, I spent eight years as a member of "The President's Own" U.S. Marine Chamber Orchestra. As the name implies, I spent most of my time in uniform at the White House or in other government buildings, performing for various official gatherings. I...

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Music Works

This past weekend, I took part in the Institute for Musicianship and Public Service, at Community MusicWorks, in Providence, RI. In a 2006 article in The New Yorker, Alex Ross described CMW as “a revolutionary organization in which the distinction between performing...

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Thanks For Sharing

Lately, I've gotten a lot of nice reminders about why I play music, and the cello in particular - this photo is exhibit A. On the right is my student Bailey, and on the left, another cellist. Yo-Yo Ma is one of the few classical musicians everyone's heard of, and...

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Won’t You Be My Neighbor?

One of my recent posts was about Play Us Forward, an educational initiative of ProMusica Chamber Orchestra, a great example of community engagement for performing groups. Another model for an orchestra getting more involved in the community comes from Germany, where...

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All In The Family

Today would have been my father's 77th birthday. He was a composer and played a big part in my musical development. We often played music together, and talked about music (along with baseball and politics), from when I was in elementary school until he passed away...

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