Huffington College

A life-long pursuit, becoming a good musician requires self-challenge, self-criticism, a desire to go further, deeper, into a musical work, exploring what a composer meant or how best to realize one's own expressive ideas in an original composition. Tony Woodcock http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tony-woodcock/

"My heart soars like a hawk." I have always cherished this line and I found myself invoking it many times recently in connection to events following the Boston Marathon bombing. Tony Woodcock http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tony-woodcock/

This terrible week will stay in our memories. It is with us now. Unresolved. A scream like the mighty dissonance of that Mahlerian scream in his 10th Symphony. But we will conquer its summit and plumb its depths. Tony Woodcock http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tony-woodcock/

We are all prone to plateau in our endeavors, because we don't have such constant critical prodding and feedback. So our tennis, golf, snooker, running, weightlifting attain a certain level, but then get stuck. Tony Woodcock http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tony-woodcock/

Concert programmers, teaching artists , armies of program annotators, and museums with their rental headsets believe that audiences today lack experience and confidence in approaching an art work. Tony Woodcock http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tony-woodcock/

My top priority -- of course -- is to protect the young people who study here, our faculty and staff, and all the many thousands of concert visitors we have every year. But this mandate necessitates negotiating a way through a challenging Scylla and Charybdis of choices. Tony Woodcock http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tony-woodcock/