About the Workshops
I love to teach. The light in the eye of a student who has just realized how to make their practice time work better for them, or how to gain a deeper connection with the music they play is immensely rewarding to me. My teaching style is to meet the student where they are and help them find a path forward that feels right for them.
With this style in mind I have developed two popular and well received workshops. One based around my book “Between The Beats”, a guide to strengthening our relationships to rhythm specifically geared towards melodic instruments.
What I love about teaching this material is how quickly the students at any level experience surprising improvement and newfound perspective in both practice and performance. Since the system is not style or instrument specific, the concepts are easily applicable to anything they may be working on, making it easy to include in their current practice routines. The result is a methodology that puts developing our relationship to time in constant focus, no matter the context.
I also teach a masterclass on how to use improvisation as a practice tool to build a deeper emotional connection to the music. Often times students get bogged down in the technical difficulties of a piece and they forget to enjoy the process of making music. The tension that arises when this happens makes it even more difficult to play the technical passages. I use improvisation as a tool to deconstruct the music and communicate with the composer from the practice room, giving difficult technical passages a sense of purpose and joy rather than tension and fear.
I’ve found that often times the struggle in a difficult passage is not the notes themselves. There is usually something about the passage we have missed. These tow methods work in tandem to isolate the actual issue without placing judgement on it and then giving the student a clear path forward.
Past Workshops
I have given these workshops for Keith Underwood's classical flute students at NYU, at West Virginia University working with Nina Assimakopolos' flute studio individually and as a group over two weeks, Hidden Valley Music Seminars in California working with mixed classical and jazz musicians, the 2019 and 2017 New York Flute Fair at Colombia University for classical flutists, the 2018 National Flute Association Convention in Orlando for mixed classical and jazz flutists, Hands On Research festival 2018 in Aveiro (Portugal), Hvitfeldtska Gymansiet in Gothenburg (Sweden) and more.