The last few months have been busy as always, with our studios operating near capacity. My examining route in January took me to Toronto Central at the RCM building on Bloor Street as well as the Toronto suburb of Markham. I'll be in the studio teaching until early April when I travel to Winnipeg for a few days of examining. Then in late April I drive to London, Ontario for up to a week of adjudicating at the Kiwanis Music Festival of London before the final push to the end of the teaching year.

You may have noticed that this is the first newsletter that I've published in quite a while. After a lengthy hiatus, I'm once again writing the Foley Music and Arts blog as well as this (mostly) weekly newsletter. My reasons for returning are complex, but foremost is the need to create safe, curated, non-algorithmic ways to read about cool stuff without the trauma-inducing experience of news and social media sites. Cedric Chin's idea of Outcome Orientation rather than an Information Diet was one of the ideas that helped to facilitate my return to blogging.

At the same time, there was a lot of online stuff to reorganize, including my teaching site on My Music Staff ahead of the sunsetting of their previous website building tool in a few months. The process of building something for the web was incredibly satisfying. It was also time to renew collaborativepiano.com, which I'll write about next week. Looking through my Squarespace dashboard I discovered an unpublished draft from a few years ago, my discovery of the 1898 Toronto Conservatory of Music annual calendar at the Toronto Old Book and Paper Show, as well as some musings about how their location at College and University was important for Toronto's musical life at the time, much of it now forgotten. 

Here's some interesting stuff from around the web:

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Today's photo is from a day of examining ARCT candidates last month in Mazzoleni Concert Hall at The Royal Conservatory.