My music education

I’m writing a chapter of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Technology and Music Education. Here’s a section of what I wrote, about my own music learning experiences.

Most of my music education has happened outside of the classroom. It has come about intentionally, through lessons and disciplined practice, and it has come about unintentionally, through osmosis or accidental discovery. There has been no separation between my creative practice, my learning, and my teaching.

My formal music education has been a mixed bag. In elementary school, I did garden-variety general music, with recorders and diatonic xylophones. I don’t remember enjoying or not enjoying it in particular. I engaged more deeply with the music my family listened to at home: classical and jazz on public radio; the Beatles, Paul Simon and Motown otherwise. Like every member of my age cohort, I listened to a lot of Michael Jackson, and because I grew up in New York City, I absorbed some hip-hop as well.

In middle school we started on traditional classical music. I chose the cello, for no good reason except that I had braces and so was steered away from wind instruments. I liked the instrument, and still do, but the cello parts in basic-level Baroque music are mostly sawing away at quarter notes, and I lost interest quickly. Singing showtunes in chorus didn’t hold much appeal for me either, and I abandoned formal music as soon as I was able.

I found my way back into music through the back door: self-taught blues harmonica, rock and folk guitar, bluegrass mandolin, and unfocused poking around on the keyboard. My adolescent obsession with the Grateful Dead was the gateway into a broader musical universe: country, ragtime, free jazz, fusion, funk, reggae, and abstract electronica. As a senior in college, I started a sprint through formal jazz theory, which gave me a useful toolkit for all of the other music I was interested in.

I spent my twenties gigging with rock, jazz and country bands, writing and performing music for theater both traditional and wildly experimental, and fumbling with recording and production. I tried Cubase and Rebirth before settling into an extended trial-and-error study of Reason and Pro Tools. I suddenly found myself in possession of the ability to produce the hip-hop and synth-oriented pop I had liked as a kid, but had long since written off as not being ‘real’ music. I have always envied drummers, and dance music software gave me the ability to become one, and to visualize musical time in new ways.

I entered NYU’s Music Technology masters program in my late thirties with a well-established personal style blending improvisational jazz grooves with the polished rectangular surfaces of electronic dance music, along with a strongly felt belief that the job of a musician (and music teacher) is to help make life more bearable. Grad school was my first brush with prescriptivist formal theory since eighth grade, and I was repulsed. My encounter with the modernist avant-garde also did not give me much enthusiasm. I much preferred studying with the film music composers, whose eclecticism, pragmatism and ‘whatever works’ attitude aligned more closely with my own. I also gravitated toward music education, and was delighted to discover the constructivist movement, as personified by Alex Ruthmann and his merry coterie of makers and tinkerers.

So now, here I am, continuing to teach and study privately and informally, but also teaching and learning in two very formal settings, New York University and Montclair State University. I feel that I’ve arrived home; as a music technologist, I have more freedom to teach using creativity and so-called ‘popular’ music than I would as a theorist or composer (even though I am both of those things as well.) My main goal is to help my students use technology as a tool for liberating their expressive potential.