- Piano
- Trombone
- Composition & Songwriting
- Pop & Jazz Voice
- Musicianship & Techniques of Music
I offer private piano study to adult beginners who wish to play the piano for pleasure. I will also teach committed trombone students from beginner level to university audition coaching. I teach improvisational music-making to beginner & professional musicians. My teaching is infused with Eastern & Western philosophy, psychology, art, and the humanities. I also offer parent-child music lessons.
I studied orchestral trombone & composition at The Mannes School of Music in New York, and at The Royal Conservatory of Brussels in Belgium. I toured and performed with orchestras around the world through the 1990s. Today I focus on jazz piano and contemporary solo piano composition and performance.
I began teaching piano & trombone from my childhood home in Wind Gap in 1997. Water Street has been the home to piano, organ, trumpet, and violin teachers in Wind Gap since the early 1900s. Today my home studio is located in the same neighborhood, one block away, on Washington Street. I enjoy continuing the neighborhood’s tradition of private music teaching.
I have been a college professor of psychology since 2005. Over the years I have learned a great deal about thinking, learning, and education. I can offer students of all ages useful approaches to learning how to learn. I will work with parents, youngsters, adolescents, as well as adult and university-level students.
Peak-performance is a concept made popular by the psychologist Abraham Maslow. It involves discovering an individual’s process towards self-actualization and personal mastery. I prefer to speak of authentic performance, rather than peak-performance. I offer individuals who struggle with technical aspects of the creative process, as well as performance and practice issues, ways of overcoming their difficulties. Topics that I often see are completion and organization of projects, performance anxiety, and mental and emotional blocks to technical mastery.