I have been teaching songwriting for a lot of years as a means to other ends: with my private guitar and production students, with my music tech students, with my music education students, with my music theory students. But this semester at The New School, I get to teach my first actual songwriting class whose …
Category Archives: Autobio
My year in writing
I wrote a lot of stuff this year! First, let’s talk about the big projects that I started in previous years but finished in 2022. The biggest one was my doctoral dissertation. Read the story of it here. Now I’m in the gradual process of adapting it into a more accessible format, probably a book …
The first day of Contemporary Music Theories at the New School
Here are the tracks we listened to on the first day of Contemporary Music Theories at the New School. The class is a requirement for music majors, and as its name suggests, it is intended to give a broad-based understanding of music theory, not just Western tonal theory. We started things off with excerpts of …
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Bach Anxiety
Someday I want to write something long about Bach. (Maybe I’ll call it Bach to the Future, ha ha.) I have been slowly building toward it by doing a lot of Bach analysis here on the blog. My pandemic project has been learning movements from the D minor, G minor and E major violin partitas …
Elizabeth Cotten’s fingerstyle ragtime
Dust-to-digital posted this lovely performance of “Washington Blues” by Elizabeth Cotten. It reminded me that she is the greatest and that I should write more about her. If you are a guitarist, you might notice that there is something strange about her technique. She was left-handed, but rather than stringing a guitar in reverse the …
The tale of my PhD
As of last week, I am the proud recipient of a doctorate in music education from NYU. It was quite a journey! (Isn’t it always?) The official part took me six years, but the whole process really took more like ten years, or twenty, or thirty, depending on how you count. In this post I’ll …
Who’s got two thumbs and a PhD in music education?
This guy! You can read my dissertation here.
Theory Hacks with Ableton
I’m happy to announce the release of my first project for the good folks at Ableton, a Classroom Project called Theory Hacks. It’s a set of free resources for educators who want to teach music theory and songwriting/composition to beginners using Live. In this post, I explain the pedagogical motivations for the project.
Technology Trends in Music Education
This semester, I am teaching Technology Trends in Music Education at NYU Steinhardt for the first time. The class was originally developed by my doctoral advisor, Alex Ruthmann. I took it as a masters student, and the experience was critical to the eventual development of the Groove Pizza. So you can understand why I am …
My current Intro to Music Technology syllabus
There is no required text for this class; all of the readings are online. However, if you are a music education major or you plan to teach music technology, I recommend buying Electronic Music School: a Contemporary Approach to Teaching Musical Creativity by Will Kuhn and myself.