"Aesthetics" Blogs & Blog Posts

Sometimes you find a thought sloshing around the back of your mind in an intriguing but unfocused way for quite a while, when suddenly you come across something that brings it sharply into focus. I’ve had a couple of these recently, both sparked by...

I’m coming back today to a topic that Michael Callahan raised in response to my post about Practical Aesthetics earlier in the year, and which I noted as a big one that deserved separate reflection. The question is this: to what extent does an audi...

I’m on record for feeling somewhat critical of the practice of choral breathing – that is, of singers in a choir managing their breathing points by breathing whenever they feel like, so long as it’s at a different time from their neighbours, an...

I’m coming back to the ideas Theo Hicks shared in his final plenary at the BABS/LABBS Directors Weekend back in January, as my first post on the subject produced some great discussion, but in a variety of different places. So I thought it worth bri...

I mentioned at the start of my recent post on Theo Hicks’s session on Philosophies of Musical Enjoyment that I had been spurred into getting it written and posted by a conversation with a director who hadn’t been there, but might, I hypothesised,...

The final plenary session at January’s LABBS/BABS Directors Weekend was led by Theo Hicks on the topic, ‘Philosophies of Musical Enjoyment: Listening for the Singers’ Joy’. It produced lots of things I wanted to reflect on, and because I kept...

Sometimes you find a common theme emerging in a variety of different parts of your life, and it’s interesting to reflect on how the same principle plays out in different contexts. While arranging I’m looking at the most recent one first, as it w...