There’s an old brainteaser about a frog stuck at the bottom of a well. The well is thirty feet deep, but the poor frog can only jump five feet high. There’s good news: he sticks to the wall at the end of his jump. But there’s bad news too: he can only muster the energy […]
Out of shape and short on time? Lose the etudes, grab these excerpts
My first meeting with Professor Stephen Shipps did not go well. In my defense, I was only sixteen at the time. But Professor Shipps is not a man to be trifled with, and I most certainly trifled. Seconds before he announced my name and program to the jury at the 1994 American String Teachers Association national […]
Stacy LeSartre won my New York violin audition Challenge with an unexpected strategy
Week by week last fall, the number of violinists still remaining in my New York Philharmonic violin audition Challenge dwindled: sixty, thirty, twenty. By the time we got to the home stretch, the last few weeks of nearly four months of audition preparation, only fourteen violinists were left. It was pretty clear that those fourteen […]