Thomas J. West Music

In this new age of transparency thanks to the Internet, regimes in the middle east have crumbled, skeletons are coming out of closets, and many situations that were "don't ask, don't tell" in the recent past are no longer socially acceptable. The more public your life and your work are, the more of a responsibility ...

I have been offering live private music lessons via webcam since 2008. Over that course of time, the online environment has changed dramatically thanks to social media advances. Despite these trends, my student roster continues to be sporadic and modest in size. I had attributed that primarily to the notion that online lessons had ...

KeyStone A Cappella is my newly-formed semi-professional contemporary a cappella singing group. We were formed in April of 2011 and sang our first public performances in December. KeyStone sent an application to the Mid...

Yesterday, I shared one side-project that has kept me from writing my typical blog posts this fall. Today, I will r...

There are a lot of very clever pieces of humor circulating social media right now about the Occupy Wall Street protests.  The image on this blog post was one I collected from Facebook this morning. It lampoons the #OWS slogan by stating a similarity in clas...

The image above is making rounds on Facebook right now amongst my musician compatriots. Let's give this creativity some web traffic, shall we?

Over the past year, new professional learning networks for music educators have sprung up and are revolutionizing the way music teachers communicate. Here is an update on which networks are seeing the most use and have the best resources available:

A fellow member of the Music Professional Learning Network forwarded me an email from the founder of a new online service that connects music teachers with music students for online webcam lessons.

Copyright law has been well-established historically in the United States for over 100 years, and hasn't changed much since the copyright law of 1976. Copyright law is quite simply what it implies: the creator of an intellectual work retains all rights to copy and distribute their work to the public. When an author or composer uses a publishing company to distribute their work, they sign away some or all of their right...

This article is the fourth in an ongoing series called "21st Century Artistry". You can read the other entries in this series here.

People dream of being rich and famous as an athlete, musician, or entertainer of some kind. The competition in such fields is extremel...