CELLO LESSONS
My purpose for teaching is to empower students of all backgrounds to be creative thinkers and leaders. Rather than requiring all students to adhere to a traditional preconceived curriculum, I devise personalized approaches for each individual student or chamber music group. My student-centered learning strategies encourage students to improvise creative solutions to solve their own technical problems by inventing exercises around challenges in the repertoire. I invite my students to select their own solo and chamber-music repertoire while also drawing from traditional technical studies, including, but not limited to:
Beginning
Essential Elements
All For Strings
Suzuki
Intermediate
Suzuki (until book 4)
Rick Mooney’s “Double Stops,” “Position Pieces,” and “Thumb Position” books for Cello
Alwin Schroeder’s technical studies
Advanced
Popper Etudes
Piatti Etudes
Sevcik “Changing the Positions” Op. 8 & Bowing studies
WRITING & MUSIC HISTORY
As a Writing Center Consultant and Early Music Department TA, I have learned that all students, regardless of cultural or academic background, mainly want to communicate and to be heard. As a scholarly mentor, I work to help my students identify meaningful research problems and avoid the simplest answers to those problems, instead offering fresh perspectives informed by their personal identities. My students and I workshop arguments and syntax just as we would a difficult passage of a concerto: turning a sentence around backwards or inside-out, eliminating superfluous words and making stylistically-informed decisions about the shape of the phrase. I remind my writing and music performance students alike that there are as many exceptions as there are rules, and that grammar is just a tool—rather than an obstacle—meant to empower us with choices for expression.