See All the New Updates on My Website!

I’ve released over 50 pieces of music in the last 30 days, many of which were previously unavailable. So if you’ve contacted me about any of these previously unavailable pieces, please check out the NEW search bar feature in the Menu and search by title, category, topic, keyword, and more. Here is brief one minute video explaining the updates and how easy it is to see, hear, and order the sheet music you’ve been looking for.

Please contact me if I can be of help. Thanks for visiting!

Check out the Search Bar in the Menu at danielcartermusic.com. Search by title, topic, category, keyword, and more. Easy steps for finding and ordering sheet music in over 24 categories with over 150 pieces of music available. See all the updates and over 50 new pieces released in the last 30 days.

How to Transpose Music for Your Instrument.

If you play an instrument that is not tuned to concert pitch—for example, a B-flat clarinet, or English horn, French horn, etc., you may find this article helpful in showing you how to transpose music to the right key. Click on the link that will take you to the article.

How to Transpose Music for Your Instrument

How to Read Music and Rhythm in 10 Minutes for Beginners

Here is a handy guide for novice musicians, students, and teachers. It’s a quick, easy breakdown of note values and rhythms and how to begin mastering music notation. Bookmark and share this article with anyone you think may be interested and don’t hesitate to give me feedback if you’d like.

Click the link below to see and read the article.

“How to Read Music and Rhythm in 10 Minutes for Beginners”

Where Do Broken Dreams Go in a Pandemic?

2020 has not been a good year for humanity. And I think it’s safe to say that every musician, composer, publisher, conductor, every novice to professional musician is in a very real state of crisis, mourning or both. We have no idea when we will be able to safely gather to create the music that will not only entertain the world, but also soothe, inspire, and give courage and hope. Many of us feel like we are literally dying from this isolation.

It is extremely important that we grieve our losses. Our losses are deeply significant. The world as we know it has been changed, perhaps forever. What was routine and normal, what we looked forward to, and what we disliked are most likely gone.

We are at Ground Zero. We survey the damage and it’s too overwhelming to take in. We can’t even collect in groups to hug and reassure each other. It’s obscene. But there is something in human nature that allows us to not just survive, but thrive. It’s acceptance. Acceptance that this new, despicable, horrible normal is here to stay. And we will not let it destroy us. We will not let it keep us from figuring out how to fill the world with the music that we not only merely love, but music that we need. Music we ache for.

Our dreams are broken but not destroyed.

I’ve had a lot of big dreams. Not all of them have become a reality. Some dreams seem fine to just fade, while others feel like a death of sorts for having not come true. Those are the broken dreams. The ones that matter that haven’t become a reality.

The trouble with broken dreams is that they don’t go away even after we discard them and give up. They sit in our gut like an infection—an unfulfilled lump of failure. If they’d just die and go away we could move on. But they don't because we still believe in them. Did you get that? We still believe in them. They matter to us. We still have the passion but are at a standstill. We still have that love to create and make them come true, but for whatever reason, we can’t. So what do you do about broken dreams?

I finally gave up on one of my biggest broken dreams a few years ago and after I did, I woke up one morning and had a clear idea of how to proceed. I realized, finally, by walking away from the dream because of so much resistance, that a reset button was pushed that cleared everything and allowed a new thought process to develop. Resistance disappeared. (Resistance is usually always a result of our perceptions and thinking.) What I learned was that broken dreams usually just need a little space, a break, a change, and then creativity can thrive again. I learned that it’s extremely rare that a dream is so broken that it can’t be realized in some way.

I learned to embrace the Zen Proverb that teaches “the obstacle is the path.” The question is do you see and feel the difference between resistance and obstacles? Resistance is counterproductive. Obstacles are a gift. This seems counterintuitive at first, but what path have you encountered that doesn’t have obstacles? Overcoming obstacles (and failures) are the gifts that teach us how to claim our power to continue forward.

Trying to restore the reality we once knew is resistance. Steven Pressfield, in his groundbreaking book “The War of Art,” wrote “Resistance is self-sabotage. Resistance is experienced as fear; the degree of fear equates to the strength of Resistance.” When you encounter so much resistance that you can’t seem to move forward, let go and take a break. I can’t stress this enough. If your timeline is being threatened with seemingly no way forward, then your timeline is your resistance. Let it go.

There is another important key to realizing dreams. Being unattached to the outcome of your dream will help you accept and embrace all kinds of new possibilities and help you see and create new pathways, avoiding resistance. That means hold steady to the vision of your dreams. In other words, what do you see and feel when you envision your dream coming true? Hang on to that! See it, taste it, smell it, feel it, touch it! Don’t let it go! However, the important part here is not to predestine how your dream will come true, simply because you won’t be able to foresee the obstacles in your path, which are a natural part of the process. Keep the vision and embraces all those feelings, but don’t attach an outcome. The outcome is too often out of our control because we can’t foresee all the possible ways it might materialize. The outcome will materialize the way it needs to, and you will experience all those feelings you envisioned.

Our dreams may be broken, but they are not destroyed. They are probably just begging for you to take a break to stop resistance, be still, allow creativity to return when we are ready, and embrace the obstacles we face.

And despite a pandemic, social distancing, and so many obstacles, we live in an age where technology allows us to dream together.

Beloved

I lay awake in the wee hours this morning, unable to go back to sleep. This is a fairly regular occurrence for me at this age. Perhaps aging is part of it, but also perhaps decades of not being able to sleep because of abuse, trauma and loss set a hard pattern after nearly 60 years. Now it’s different. It isn’t waking up in terror or grief, it’s about waking up and realizing I’m listening to something else. Something that feels more like a guide, a help, something intuitive, reaffirming and beautiful. These sleepless portions of the night are now messages, and the messages always have such clarity and reassurance that I can’t be frustrated about losing any sleep. They are messages of love. What a difference that is from the dark decades.

I stopped praying a long time ago. I couldn’t believe in a god that was defined as just another hateful human. God loved that person, hated this person, and I lived in terror of what that vengeful god would do to me. As if I hadn’t suffered enough already. The trauma and losses were too much for me and they literally drove me insane. I was on all kinds of medications including psychotropics leading up to my suicide attempt in 2005. (I am no longer on any medications for mood stabilization, and have not been since the latter part of 2005.) It wasn’t until after that event with years and years of deep counseling that I could finally let go of god and everything I was taught to believe and finally fall into a universe that I discovered was not only benevolent but absolute love. As I forgave and healed, I discovered that love is only two-dimensional until there is forgiveness. With forgiveness, there is grace. Grace is simply everything that is impossible for us to undo, correct, to have or obtain but still, somehow it happens. It’s impossible for us because we are so finite, so fragile and unknowingly ignorant, unable to comprehend the depth and height. I discovered that as I embraced forgiveness and love, love doesn’t simply become three-dimensional, love fills every dimension, every particle, everything until it is all love. That means you don’t have to look for love, you have the choice to become love. That’s a paradigm shift that blew my mind. The paradox is simply that we have a choice to become love or to pretend that there is something else. When we pretend there is something else other than love, we wander. We disconnect from ourselves and our source and we get lost. Actually, paradoxically, we’re supposed to wander. We’re supposed to go and discover, and create, test boundaries, and get lost, and then we’re supposed to feel the loss and reconnect with ourselves first, and then grace, always on time, connects us to our benevolent, loving universe and we whole again. It’s designed this way. We are not just sinners looking for forgiveness. We are creators, explorers testing everything, testing and pushing our bodies and our minds to break new ground. To feel new things, to fill voids, to be on the leading edge of human experience. If that doesn’t describe the mess of our world and civilization, I don’t know what does. Of course, there are going to be terribly tragic things that happen. Things go wrong in order for us to learn to make them right. How could we gain the understanding or knowledge otherwise? If god handed all this to us, we’d have no experience with it and it would be useless to us because we would not be able to comprehend the gift. We have to do it for ourselves. But experience brings comprehension and understanding. We need the contrasts of light and dark in order to understand the power of both. Without contrast, we lose options to create and discover.  

That’s my take on it. That’s my experience. And because it is my experience, no one else’s will be identical to mine. Opinions of my experience don’t matter because I own them. They are singular to me.

As I’ve healed and these sleepless portions of my night became more friendly than frustrating, I began to talk to Beloved. I couldn’t talk to god. I have enough issues with authoritarian commands and definitions that god is not an option. So as I listen to the Beyond I made a decision that for me I needed to name it something and that something is Beloved. And they are complete and absolute love. They. I don’t know why it’s “They” but it is. Mostly They don’t answer, and I just do my talking and meditating with them and I get a few new ideas. I get connected and I’m able to go about my day and choose kindness and love rather than spew some awful, knee-jerk response to all this messy human condition.

I’ve had long talks with my sister, Evelyn. She’s a “woo-woo” gal and I’m a “woo-woo” guy. We get each other. I’ve questioned whether I’m completely bat-shit cray-cray many times, and as I’ve told Evelyn my concern she basically said that all humans need a mythology. We call it religion, but in reality, it’s a mythology. The reason is simple: if we don’t connect to something greater than ourselves, we have no reason to discover and become our best selves. We descend into a self-made hell and treat ourselves and others with hate and contempt because there is no purpose or reason to do anything else. But a mythology, a reason to discover and become our best self is the highest in us. It’s a way to connect the dots that don’t make sense. Without a mythology or religion, it’s not that everything happens for a reason, it’s just that everything happens. And it makes no sense. But with a mythology, there is a reason for things that happen. We connect the dots and life has purpose and meaning and we gain understanding. I don’t know that there anything more beautiful in the entire universe than to discover that there is meaning and purpose behind everything, and it’s all based in love. As I expressed my concern about whether or not I’m making all this up she said basically that who cares if you’re making it up? If it’s bringing you healing, love and connection with your planet, your human family and the universe, isn’t that what you’ve hoped for all these decades? And you know what? I suddenly realized how beautiful it is to honor other people’s journey, to love them on their path, to let them have the joy of their own mythology or religion, or whatever it is, and become love on the journey. My journey. Their journey. Our journey. I no longer worry if there is a god or if Jesus died for my sins. The symbols and meaning of all these things really are beautiful. So I have no regrets for being so religious that I was obligated to adhere to and enforce every bit of religious doctrine whether I agreed with it or not. I can look at the beauty of a loving god sending someone like Jesus to offer us atonement and grace, and I can still weep my tears of gratitude.

When I wake, it’s usually between 3 am and 5 am. Sometimes I can fall back to sleep.  Not this time. I asked Beloved if it was time to write about this and there was nothing. But I felt a smile. That’s all it was. Who cares if I’m making this stuff up? I’m more sane, happier, more at peace, and I treat others with kindness and love. If I’m batshit cray-cray, then this is the only way to live for me. And as I imagine any of you out there reading this, I imagine me smiling at you, sending you love, near or far.

The Fatal Flaw of Positive Thinking and How to Fix It

The power of positive thinking can revolutionize your life for the better, but there is a fatal flaw in thinking that it means eliminating everything that’s negative in our lives. Do you know why? Because eliminating everything that’s negative is impossible. We don’t live in a world where it’s all one way or the other. It’s a mix of both and it always will be. Like the contrast between light and dark, or joy and sorrow, we have contrast that allows us to comprehend both. Even positive and negative protons and electrons coexist and work together in a beneficial way. By having contrast, we have unlimited options to choose and create what we want. Without contrast, our options are profoundly limited.

In today’s world, there is a popular idea to “cut off toxic people” for the sake of “being positive.” This option is valid to a degree because there are probably people in our lives that don’t have our best interests in mind, and we probably shouldn’t associate with them. But is it possible that some people are trying to tell us the truth? They may appear to be difficult or negative, but what if they are trying to help us rather than keep us from what we really want? In other words, looking past their negative tone may hold a positive way forward. To find the value in what they say will require us to let go of our anger, disappointment, and hurt. If there is value in what they say it becomes a positive experience.

The pursuit of a positive life can be sabotaged by instant gratification. In fact, it seems many believe that instant gratification isn’t instant enough. For example, it’s easy to compare our lives to celebrities’ and wonder why their lives seem to be picture-perfect, and ours seem to suck. Aside from the fact that they are only showing you the pretty parts of their lives to impress you, they probably have some pretty sucky days and months that they don’t reveal. (Perhaps in part because they value a certain level of privacy.) Many of us admire and want to be like our favorite celebrities. It’s easy to get caught up in whatever the latest trend of “success” might be, hoping to emulate them to achieve a similar life. And those who write and speak about success, including celebrities, usually use the same keywords over and over. Words like “dedication,” “determination,” “set goals,” and “don’t allow negativity”. We get inspired long enough to decide to grit our teeth and push our way to what we want. We believe we must cut off “toxic” people, or we fall for instant money-making schemes, or a shady lure to gain millions of followers overnight, or try an unhealthy binge diet, or overdose on workouts at the gym our first month until we are sick and tired and want to quit. Just reading that last sentence is filled with tension. Constant tension is not a positive thing, it’s destructive. No wonder it’s easy to jump to the conclusion that positive thinking doesn’t work—because thinking positively all the time and having only positive results are impossible.

If you were to make a graph of your progress through life, it certainly wouldn’t be linear with a steady, straight line, angled upward. It would be as complex as looking at a graph of the stock market from the past several decades. You’d see small blips up and down, some enormous dives and some huge vertical leaps. But overall you’d see at each ascending point a line moving upward.

You are designed to be well. Even healing from illness is not completely linear. There are setbacks, good days, and bad ones, but we usually progress to wellness again. That’s because our natural state is wellness. It means that our bodies always work to be well, despite setbacks. (Isn’t that an amazingly positive thought about illness?) When I realized this in the middle of some huge depression and health issues, I decided to wake up each morning and thank my body for working so hard to make me well. That waking gratitude every morning changed my life for the better. My gratitude list began to grow longer and longer, and my depression began to fade and my health improved. I still wake every morning with gratitude.

There is a beautiful way to look at negative things: any negative experience that you don’t want might actually be a gift that helps point you toward something that you do want. If you can find something valuable about a negative experience, you win. You discover that no matter how bad, no matter how negative the experience is, there may be a lesson of value in it that could give you knowledge and power to ultimately achieve or become what you want. This is one of the secrets to living a life without regrets.

To summarize, there are two critical parts to make positive thinking effective: 

1) Avoid the flawed assumption that positive thinking means to eliminate everything negative. Trying to do so is impossible in a world where positive and negative experiences always exist. 


2) Positive thinking—and this is your superpower—is the result of allowing and accepting both positive and negative experiences, which help you learn and adapt, giving you the power to create a happy, positive life.

Music Activates the Entire Human Brain

There is a terrible scenario in education that has played out over and over again for the past several decades that is actually dumbing down our youth and impairing our society. We have witnessed this not only first-hand but have read and seen the headlines countless times. That scenario is all too often that when education budgets need to be cut, music education and performance activities are usually among the first. The perception is always about the same. That assumption that “it’s just music,” implies that music is frivolous. The assumption goes dangerously further—music isn’t going to build our society with contributors as much as a focus on science, math, language studies, or even sports. So sports aren’t axed but music and the arts are.

The fact is scientists have found that learning and performing music and developing those skills is the only activity that activates the whole brain. Further, people who stutter actually don’t when they sing. Additionally, the aging and those suffering from mental decline respond and move to music, and music is used as a tool to slow or inhibit further decline.

Mounting scientific evidence states clearly that those youth who learn music skills have an academic advantage over their peers who do not. They score better in science, math, and language arts, have better problem-solving skills and in the long-term are often more invested in their communities making them valuable contributors in the home, in civic, and in education-based activities. Children who grow up learning music skills usually incorporate and include music throughout their lives and pass it on to their own children and families.

For those of you who would like to begin learning how to read music, click on the highlighted link to read Learn to Read Music in Ten Minutes. I hope you’ll bookmark the link and share it.

Read Psychology Today’s recently published Music Participation Is Linked to Teens’ Academic Achievement and you’ll be amazed at the findings.

And one last article well worth the read is Brain World’s article, Music, Rhythm and the Brain.

As long as we have a voice, I hope to see many more advocates keep music education in our classrooms. A good way to begin is by making sure that music learning and performing activities are in our homes.

Inspiration, Play, and Failure Bring Success

To me, the most critical elements of success are inspiration, play, and failure. Not drive, not ambition, not an insane list of unachievable goals. Just inspiration, play, and failure. We are not efficient machines. We are humans. We have good days and bad days, productive ones, and unproductive ones. Pushing too hard, making unachievable goals, and constant drive without built-in rest will kill success quicker than anything else I know. And when you hit burnout, it’s relaxation and play that will make things right again, giving inspiration a chance to return. When we “work” we refer to the adult drudgery of duty and obligation, usually for money. But it’s play that will help us discover, experiment, learn, and progress.

Think about it: when a child experiments and learns, it’s called play. And it’s play that leads to discovery, inspiration, and those remarkable “aha” moments that lead to success. When children play, they learn about the world they live in. They learn about everything around them. They learn about relationships that not only include people, but they also learn about form, balance, design, space and proportion, light, dark and color and so much more. They are experiencing, and therefore, there is no failure, and they create and achieve at their level. They are wildly creative, uninhibited and the world is a canvas on which to paint their experiences.

As adults, we have been lead to believe that play is reserved for children. Adults rarely even refer to “play” except in association with children’s behavior. Play, then, by inference, is childish. Work has replaced play for adults. Therefore, if work is not “success,” it’s “failure.” Note how these two words are directly associated with “work” but not “play.” I think this is a perfect example of a very bad perception which society has created and embraced.

I taught piano lessons for over two decades. I taught many ages, including several adults. The students who had the most difficult time finding any joy at the piano were teenagers and adults who were driven to succeed, and could not tolerate making any kind of mistake (which they believed was failure). I remember one particular student who often arrived with furrowed brow, who tormented the piano. However, she would play perfectly many times, despite her harsh style. But even then her performance was mechanical and somewhat lifeless. She played ferociously no matter what the mood of the piece was. She finally admitted her fear of failing to please me which made her so tense that her muscles would only allow her to play as if she were attacking the keyboard. Finally, it dawned on me what to say to her:

“Thank you for working the piano. But we call it playing the piano for a reason. Please don’t work the piano. Please play it.”

I asked her to close her eyes and see herself playing this beautiful piece she chose, removing me from that picture altogether. After a minute or two, she opened her eyes and began playing. She was utterly amazed at the transformation of music she created. It came alive to her! The missing puzzle piece in her music was the rediscovery of play. The piano sang with emotion and feeling. Even when her playing wasn’t perfect, none of the beauty of her performance was minimized. Fear of failure was eliminated.

Play restored her joy. Failure no longer existed for her because she was playing. The stress of performing disappeared.

Did you know it’s actually failure that we need most (despite that we think we need success the most)? We fear and despise failure. We think it makes us look bad. Think about that last sentence. We don’t want to look bad because it’s embarrassing and we don’t want to feel or appear to be incapable. But that idea is always rooted in our insecurities. It’s because 
of or insecurities that we believe that “failure” is negative. In truth, even if we do fail, every failure is a lesson, a furthering of our education, a course correction pointing us back to inspiration with a modified outlook and a slight change in direction. That slight change of direction is the revolution in your life that both frightens and exhilarates you. Embrace it.

The Opposite of Love Is Not Hate

I will warn you that you need to read to the end of this blog entry to feel hope for our human family and for our world. But please do read to the end. I believe you’ll find it’s worth your time.

The opposite of love is not hate. Hate is the result of loving imperfectly but with ulterior motives. It is filled with codependence, assumption, inaccurate perceptions, half-truths and lies, manipulation, domination, and usury. (To name only a few.) As a result of our hurt and grief, we employ hate to do battle to defend ourselves, creating enmity between “us” and “them.” We process our grief and pain by spewing it to others who relate to our experiences, gaining allies that reassure us that we are not insane. (For we now have validation, which is our proof.) We align ourselves with those who have been similarly maligned and set up battle lines feeling new strength for our cause from being wronged, continuing to enable and justify our victimhood. We become the infantry, captains, and generals of our cause to hate. We vote into office those who will hate with us and for us, believing that creating great armies to eliminate “them”—the ones who have wronged us and disagreed with us—will restore our peace and well-being. As we publish our opinions loudly and divide our family and friends, we become the pawns of governments, institutions, and religions doing their bidding.

As the battle rages, we lose hope because all around us are the walking dead whose vitriol and screams pierce our love-starved souls. There is no point in dying because there is a war to wage. With broken hearts, missing eyes, (because an eye for eye makes the world blind) and traumatized, shattered souls, we expect some ruthless, justice-driven god to make it all right for us because we claim we don’t know how to. But we do really. It's just that we refuse to let go of our justified hate. We sit in our misery and remorse and pretend we have no idea why we feel this way. It's all just so overwhelming, we lament. Our egos scream justice while our souls weep for the lack of love.

But if there is a god, why would this omnipotent being right all of our wrongs for us, denying us the opportunity to learn and understand forgiveness? If this god did such a thing there would be no lessons learned, no understanding or comprehension that we are all the same set of molecules and atoms. No understanding that by our very existence there is no separation between us.

The opposite of love is apathy. Love is the emotion of caring, kindness, and concern for others. It is the universal magnet that binds us to each other, our world, and the universe. Apathy is indifference, a suppression of emotion, and the absence of interest and concern. Apathy is a result of numbing ourselves from hating too much and too long.

The difference between hate and apathy is startling. Hate requires us to stay connected to each other by a chain of enmity. As long as there are negative feelings between two people, that chain and bond of enmity exists. The only way to break that chain is to forgive. Apathy will not break it because getting from hate to apathy means we must cease all feeling and emotion. We are addicted to our hate, and to claim apathy as our new weapon would only be a pretense. Pretending to be apathetic in place of hate is called denial. Denial aligns with other ulterior motives.

The only way to break the chains of hate is to forgive. Forgiveness is one of the most selfish things we can do because we are liberating only ourselves. However, the paradox is that by liberating ourselves, we create safety and love for others to do the same.

It may be impossible for any of us to love perfectly. Loving imperfectly is meant to be an ongoing process of increasing our love. Fred Rogers expressed it better than almost anyone by saying, “Love isn't a state of perfect caring. It is an active noun like struggle. To love someone is to strive to accept that person exactly the way he or she is, right here and now.”

Love says there is no “us” or ‘“them” There is only “we.”

37th Anniversary of "Shine for Me Again, Star of Bethlehem"

2018 marks the 37th anniversary of the publication of “Shine for Me Again, Star of Bethlehem.” Sherri Otteson Bird, (the lyricist) and I were only in our 20’s when we collaborated in creating it. Since that time, we have both received messages from all over the world of how the song has affected people for good, bringing hope, peace, consolation and more. These stories never grow old with us. In our own personal ups and downs in life, these stories give us hope to face our challenges and setbacks. So in a very real way, we and you rely on each other this way. And so I think it’s quite accurate to say that we are here to be a blessing to each other. In this world that seems so heavily afflicted with conflict of all kinds, I think on this often, and my hope is that I still have time left to add value to people’s lives, whether I ever get to meet them or not.

I wanted to say thank you personally to all the people who love our song have performed it. Thank you for sending your stories which always brighten any day, and continue to give us hope. Thank you for taking the message of this song with you into your lives, and sharing it with other lives. Thank you, thank you, thank you!

You can see and hear my Christmas thank you here.

I have often been asked how our song came about. You can read that story here.

My continued thanks to all of you, and I wish for you and your loved ones and friends a joyous holiday season!