I am currently available for private Zoom lessons. Please reach out to me via my contact page.

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My students have been accepted to prestigious composition programs, including: Indiana University, University of Miami, University of Georgia, and UCLA, well-regarded summer programs including Longy’s Divergent Studio, Vienna Summer Music, Texas New Music Festival, Valencia International Performing Arts Festival, Composers Sandbox at Hobart and William Smith College, Eighth Blackbird Creative Lab, and the Alba Summer Music Festival, and internships with LA film composers such as Lance Treviño (AMC’s Walking Dead and TNT’s Snowpiercer).

 

In composition and theory teaching, I embrace a wide range of genres, aesthetic styles, creative approaches, and technologies. I balance developing the individual student’s artistic voice with comprehensive practical concerns like notation, music technology, and entrepreneurship. My students engage in interdisciplinary collaborations with their peers and discuss relevant issues in the field from a humanities perspective.

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As a jazz pianist, I incorporate repertoire from many genres in coursework, including non-Western music and music by women, LGBTQI+, and POC composers. Students may analyze rhythm and texture in Thelonious Monk, J Dilla, Delta Blues, Jessie Montgomery, or Korean sanjo and orchestration in Duke Ellington, Lili Boulanger, or Igor Stravinsky. I expand my students’ musical associations beyond the European canon and encourage them to explore outside their already broad specialties as traditional composers, singer-songwriters, producers, marching band clarinetists, and more; I currently have students composing string quartets, musical theatre numbers, big band charts, and video game scores.

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In addition to sharing diverse repertoire, I cultivate students’ abilities with music technology including notation software, DAWs, and sample libraries through real-world, hands-on collaborations with artists in other disciplines. At Stephen F. Austin State University, I work with film, animation, dance, and theatre faculty and students culminating in dozens of student films a semester and multidisciplinary evenings showcasing student pieces. We collaborate with our Sound Recording Technology program to record and mix student works, giving students insight into professional studio work. Through this process, I provide students the skills necessary for a diversified music career, and I believe that students find success when they learn to collaborate in multiple settings.

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In undergraduate coursework, I encourage students to learn by doing—to compose, analyze, sing, improvise, collaborate with other musicians, and engage with sound in their immediate environment. To give students feedback on their projects, I use Liz Lerman’s Critical Response Process—a four-step process involving emotional responses to the work, questions from the artist, neutral questions from the audience, and constructive opinions. In this project-based approach, students learn just as much from each other as they do from the professor.

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As music is a liberal art, I believe it is important for students to analyze music holistically. Discussing and debating music’s sociohistorical context is as important as analyzing harmonic, melodic, timbral, and formal elements. In my film music class, we watch online panel talks and interviews with film composers including Terence Blanchard, Ludwig Göransson, Laura Karpman, and Hildur Guðnadóttir. We invite composer guests to our studio class such as Omar Thomas, Viet Cuong, Joel Puckett, Saad Haddad, Harriet Steinke, Bobby Ge, and others. This offers a window into composers’ working lives and provides an opportunity to discuss aesthetic issues and representation in composing.​

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In sum, I provide students with multiple models for listening, performing, analyzing, and composing music which they can apply to their future careers. I teach students to both refine their practical musical skills and to broaden their artistic horizons, preparing them for a creative life in concert composition, production, songwriting, and/or media scoring.