Tish Oney's Music Blog

                             The term “balance” is a tricky concept. My efforts toward life balance sometimes leave me feeling like I am standing atop a seesaw leaning first to one side, and then to the other to prevent one side from toppling over from too much weight while the other side flies upward from having no weight at all. How can we get anything done when we don’t know where to start, having several projects and tasks that need attention?                When a person does a lot of things well (s)he finds there are many who will bid for his/her time and energy, making boundaries difficult to set. Balance may feel like an elusive ideal that cannot be attained without excluding one important area for a period of time. This truth is crucial to understand. Unless one plans to author sixty books, for example, writing will not be a perpetual p...

When the pandemic first hit I, like so many others, paused and looked around before determining how to move forward. I saw other artists immediately getting busy on the ground floor with podcasting, home concerts, and the like, but I really didn’t feel like joining in yet. I had a book release forthcoming, and simply adjusting to what was going on took a great deal of energy, not to mention grieving for the life I missed. Gradually I began to notice that I was receiving more and more offers to write, to teach online, to share my book via radio and newspaper interviews, book reviews, and magazines, and to my delight, that trend has continued through and beyond the date of this writing. I have never been busier, in fact, at any other time in my career, and the future is looking bright, thank God.  After these months of rolling with the changes I have learned the importance of limiting my screen time in order to reclaim some time for music-making and writing. Multiple Zoom meetings, v...

How does one define "down time?" Why is it necessary? How can one maximize its benefits? Coming off an incredibly busy and intense school year, I am greatly looking forward to exploring these questions over my intentionally not-busy summer ahead... Sure, I have a couple of selected performances scheduled, but overall I am planning to take some time and genuinely REST for a change. For the artist, restfulness needs to happen if one is to remain creative. While we can (and often do) create art under pressure, our creativity lags when we are overly stressed, tired, burned out or generally overloaded for too many months/years at a time. Taking time to get away, ease the stress and place mental energies onto more creative pathways will nourish an overwhelmed artist. What can I do this summer to recharge my creative batteries? For one, I long to creep back into my dedicated practice time untouched by other encroaching commitments. Giving myself two hours to lose myself in...