Trust: The Discipline of Vulnerability Part 2: Timing Structure makes scale possible.Timing makes scale stable. Trust makes scale sustainable, and this is the uncomfortable one. In the horn section, you cannot play someone else’s instrument for them. You can prepare.You can listen.You can support. But when the entrance comes, they are responsible for their note. And you are dependent on … Read more
Timing: Leadership Has Tempo Part 1: Structure Architecture without tempo just sits there. You can design a clean system. You can define ownership. You can document everything properly. And it can still fail if the timing is wrong. Horn players learn this early. Oh, the wonders of being able to play almost an entire scale with one valve. Treacherous. Trombonists, … Read more
Structure: Architecture Before Heroics Structure. Timing. Trust. What Enterprise Technology Leadership and French Horn Playing Have in Common, More Than They Should I recently fed my website into one of those AI podcast tools. The kind that reads your content and then confidently discusses you like it just binge-watched your entire life. It was pretty neat – two fake people … Read more
Creation, catastrophe, and a wall of horn sound This week’s gigs with the KSO put me in the third horn chair. A thankless position, really. Not principal. Not second. Not the flashy exposed heroics or the harmonic glue everyone politely ignores. Third horn lives in the interior, structural, supportive, occasionally ominous, frequently essential. It’s an inspiring place to sit. By … Read more
Horn player musings of creation – from the second performance. Warm-Up Warm-up is a strange place. Nothing officially counts, yet everything matters. Notes are tested, breath is measured, confidence negotiated quietly with physics. It is preparation, but also possibility. Looking down between my feet during warm-up, I saw it again. New universes. Not fully formed. Not confident. Small clusters and … Read more
Program notes for a universe formed during intermission – Performance night one. Observed shortly before intermission. Note the presence of the creator’s feet for scale, accountability, and mild judgment. At first glance, skeptics will say the image above is just a spill.Condensation. Gravity doing what gravity does. A little gross, maybe inconvenient, but ultimately meaningless. That theory collapses under even … Read more
This is one of the most troubling things I’ve run across in a long time. TAZEWELL, Tenn. — Because of the recession, cutbacks in public schools across the country have compromised a lot of what many students have taken for granted, like after-school activities and programs. Fortunately, in Claiborne, Bell, and Lee Counties, schools have not made many critical cutbacks … Read more