Insights and information
about music, brain health, aging, and much more.
Happy Anniversary
On a Tuesday morning, April 12, 2016, about 35 eager and enthusiastic singers showed up in the crystal ballroom of the Merion in downtown Evanston for something that none of us had ever done before: a non-auditioned daytime choir designed for older adults, with...
Song Spotlight: Fly Me to the Moon
Writing about this song is great fun. This song has a history with Sounds Good Choir, which will be performing it at our tenth anniversary concerts in May 2026. I’m going to tell you three big things about “Fly Me to the Moon”: how and when it was first written and...
Guess Who’s Singing Beside You Cathy Eisen: Author, Attorney, Alto & Word Nerd
When I invited Cathy Eisen to sit for an interview, she hesitated, saying “I don’t know if I’m interesting enough.” That notion was quickly dispelled as I learned about a woman who: Had a near-death experience at age 18, suffering carbon monoxide poisoning while on a...
Beat Patterns
What Conductors Actually Do With Their Hands In an earlier blogpost, I wrote about the role of the conductor in the life of a choir—the ways in which we are leaders, the practical things that we worry about like repertoire and time management, the emotional...
The Emotional Gifts of Getting Older
I’m the director of the Good Memories Choir, a program of Sounds Good Choir, created for people with dementia and their care partners to sing together. Eleanor, 79, is a caregiver for her older sister. They had been singing with Good Memories for a year before she...
Sounds Good Choir Research Update: The Impact of Choral Singing on Older Adults’ Well-being
One of my dear friends and professional colleagues is Dr. Barbara Fiese, a clinical psychologist and academic researcher. Barb and I met the year that we were the two clinical, pre-doctoral psychology residents in the departments of Pediatrics and Child Psychiatry at...