Programming is not a morality test.

Playing familiar music is not automatically lazy. Playing obscure or contemporary music is not automatically brave. The real question is whether the performer believes in the piece strongly enough to spend the time, money…

As a cellist, I've spent countless hours exploring the works of Romantic-era composers who were also cellists. Their compositions often serve as technical challenges that push the boundaries of left-hand agility, bow control, and musical expression. After years of practice…

Cello playing did not begin with the edition on our stand.

That sounds obvious, but much of modern playing acts as if every fingering and bowing question has to be solved from scratch, usually by the cleanest and safest route…

One of the most useful phrases floating around the music business right now is “blue dot fever.”

It refers to those little blue dots on ticketing maps that show unsold seats. A pop star may have millions of monthly listeners…

At some point, I realized that I have a whole category of arrangements that are not just “put the melody in the cello and call it a day.”

I do plenty of that too, and sometimes that is exactly what…

The real story is not death. It is a fork.

One way to see musical change more clearly is to stop thinking only in large labels like Baroque, Classical, Romantic, Modern, jazz, rock, or pop. Those labels are useful, but…

I don’t know why this doesn’t exist yet, but someone needs to make a prestige biopic about the appraisers from Antiques Roadshow.

Not the antiques. The appraisers.

The people who sit in a convention center, under fluorescent lights, surrounded…

I recently watched a video discussing ten extraordinary historic piano transcriptions. It ranged from Myra Hess’s luminous arrangement of Bach’s Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring to the nearly superhuman virtuosity of Cziffra playing Flight of the Bumblebee, and finally…

Gaspar Cassadó’s Rapsodia del Sur is one of the pieces that makes me wonder why his original music is still so rarely discussed.

It is a substantial recital work: over ten minutes long, 312 measures, and built in several clearly…

Recently I came across a paper I wrote sixteen years ago, during the second year of my doctoral studies. The topic was Dmitri Shostakovich and the political pressures surrounding his symphonic works in the Soviet Union. At the time, it…

When I was about twenty-one, I had an experience with a Bernard Fendt cello that I’ve never entirely forgotten.

At the time, my teacher was helping a middleman broker sell instruments. As I remember it, the story was that the…

Again and again, when a new student begins lessons, I hear some version of the same sentence from parents: “We are not looking for our child to major in music.”

My response, at least inwardly, is always the same: your…