…and other great misheard song lyrics. After a festive and hectic holiday weekend and on this Cyber Monday – how did we ever come up with names like this for the days of our lives? – it seemed a little humor was in order. The History of Misheard Lyrics, Opus No. 13, comes from Collective Cadenza, a group of recent graduates of Julliard who are more than willing to use their classical training to lighten our mood and invite us to laugh at our culture and ourselves. I haven’t found a video on misheard hymn lines yet, but I’m sure there’s one out there. Or maybe we should all share our favorites and make one....

Some things are just better when shared. Like a cup of hot chocolate on a cold winter evening. Or a movie, couch, and blanket on a rainy Saturday afternoon. Or music, well, just about anytime. In fact, there are few things that bring people together more quickly or deeply than a shared piece of music. The challenge in this day and age, however, is that so few people feel competent to do more than listen. With a generation of budget cuts stripping our schools of music programs, and with a cultural obsession over pop star performances, most people rarely if ever have the chance to actually make music. Where once we were producers of music,...

This past Wednesday was the birthday of Shinichi Suzuki, born in Nagoya, Japan, on May 17, 1898. If his name doesn’t immediately resonate with you, perhaps thinking of the violin may help, as he developed a method used to teach even the youngest children to play what is typically considered one of the most difficult musical instruments to learn. Indeed, the “Suzuki method” has since been adapted to almost all musical instruments over the last half century and around the world. I became familiar with Suzuki and his method when our oldest child began learning to play the violin at age five. Since then, I’m not sure anything has...

Orthodoxy, translated literally, is “right praise.” In time, it came to mean “sound doctrine” and regularly conveys, more simply, “conforming to the norm.” When something is orthodox it is approved, conventional, standard practice, acceptable. The opposite of orthodox is, not surprisingly, unorthodox or, more technically speaking, heterodox. Heterodoxy literally means “different praise” or, more typically, “unsound or controversial doctrine” and “contrary to popular practice.” If “heterodoxy” is a mouthful or sounds a little unfamiliar, you might be better acquainted with its most extreme form, “heresy,” which...