Teaching
Brass Pedagogy Specialist
One-on-One Coaching will help you level up and move through any performance barriers you are experiencing. Become a part of our performance anxiety community and join other classical musicians who are breaking bounds and creating beautiful music on stage.
“I love watching someone ‘get it’ when we are going through an example together.”
Making 5/8ths of a recipe might not be a normal experience for most people, but it is for someone like me who grew up with two math professor parents. I’ve been around teaching all of my life, and I have come to be very passionate about it. I love explaining something and watching that moment in someone’s eyes when they “get” it. I also know how much difference a great teacher can make in someone’s life, especially in music.
During my Master’s Degree I had the wonderful opportunity to take part in a multi day workshop designed to teach us how to help people who are experiencing an emotional crisis. I enrolled thinking it might be helpful one day if a student ever needed it. What I didn’t expect was how applicable it is to everyday teaching.
Using techniques I learned in that workshop I have developed a style of teaching that focuses on first connecting with my students, then empowering them to improve their own playing. Connecting involves asking questions to make sure I fully understand exactly what a student is experiencing, how they feel about it -positive or negative- and what they want to change.
I want you to perform with confidence.
Empowering students is a process of helping students to realize they already have what they need to be the performer they want to be. Students often have a concept of learning music being a process of adding knowledge, much like a painting would be formed by adding paint. Eventually enough paint is on the canvas that it is considered an artwork. However I have come to believe that learning music is a process of removing the things that are preventing us from being the performer we can be. This is very much like a work of art obscured behind many pieces of tape, which are removed one by one to reveal the painting underneath. Students often feel like they are the unfinished canvas constantly in need of more paint, when in fact they are already a wonderful painting just waiting to be unveiled.
In my teaching I like referring to music as a language because it helps us to relate music to common human interactions, and find the similarities and things we already know how to do. Treating music as a form of interaction between people is where our individual personalities shine through in the music to create captivating and unforgettable performances.
Performance Articles
Staying In The Moment
“I’m sorry, can you say that again please” you say as you blink a couple times trying to figure out how you just got here.
Goals In The Practice Room
Does going on stage feel like rolling the dice? Many of the musicians I have talked to want to bridge the gap between the practice
Fear In The Practice Room
If I only had time! How often do you find yourself saying that? Well, if you are like a lot of musicians I talk to,
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