Teaching
I teach courses in jazz history, improvisation, the live music experience, embodied practice and musicianship. Some of my courses include very broad, interdisciplinary approaches to material, such as a first-year seminar on improvisational thinking that draws on evolutionary biology, neuroscience, literary theory, music and theater; or a course on listening that includes anatomy, psychology, philosophy, and political theory. Other courses have quite specialized, technical approaches: learning to hear and perform functional harmony; or developing fluency with free jazz vocabulary and practices. I approach music in my courses as a powerful cultural force that impacts everything from our most important institutions to our very bodies. I orient my teaching toward developing skills in students to examine their assumptions about culture and toward empowering them to shape their experiences, to construct their own meanings, their own lines of inquiry, and even their environments--to act as participants in, not just observers of, the discourse of music and related disciplines.