TEACHING & CREATIVE PRACTICE
Music is storytelling.
I teach composition as a collaborative practice: listening closely, understanding how music shapes narrative, developing a creative voice, and learning to communicate with the people who collectively bring a story to life.
My approach moves between composition, technology, film, performance, and production. Students do not simply learn how music works; they learn to make intentional creative choices, articulate those choices to collaborators, and carry an idea from first conversation to finished work.
A PEDAGOGY OF STORY
From listening to creating.
Music Is Storytelling began with a simple premise: before students can use music intentionally, they need to understand what musical choices can communicate.
Developed through graduate study in music education, the framework approaches composition through narrative. Students move from listening and responding to analyzing how rhythm, melody, harmony, texture, timbre, and form shape meaning; from interpreting those choices in performance to making creative decisions of their own.
The progression is deliberate: listen, understand, perform, create. Each stage asks students to move beyond identifying what music is doing toward considering why it is doing it—and eventually deciding what they want their own music to say.
LISTEN
Respond & Connect
Encounter music as story, culture, identity, emotion, and experience.
UNDERSTAND
Analyze
Examine how musical elements work together to shape narrative and meaning.
PERFORM
Interpret
Make expressive choices and discover how performance can change the way a story is understood.
CREATE
Compose
Apply musical understanding intentionally to develop and communicate ideas of one's own.
LEARNING THROUGH MAKING
FROM IDEA TO FINISHED WORK.
Composition becomes meaningful when students have something to communicate and people with whom to communicate it. Projects become laboratories for making creative decisions: defining an idea, experimenting with musical possibilities, responding to collaborators, revising the work, and carrying it through performance, recording, and production.
The finished artifact matters, but so does the process that produces it. Students learn to listen to one another, explain creative choices, respond to feedback, solve technical and musical problems, and recognize that collaboration is not simply dividing responsibilities.
Collaborators learn to work together—and continue to learn from one another.
COMPOSITION AS
COLLABORATIVE STORYTELLING
Since 2011, I have developed five original graduation-song projects with students, using their experiences, reflections, and aspirations as source material for collaborative composition. Each iteration has changed with the students and circumstances—from writing with a small group of high-school students to Reflecting Me, created through the disruptions of hybrid learning, and later projects developed through classroom recording and production.
COMPOSITION IN CONTEXT
Music does not exist alone.
A score lives in relationship to something else: character, dialogue, pacing, performance, editing, sound, and the intentions of the people creating the work. Learning to compose for a story therefore means learning to listen beyond the music itself.
I approach scoring as both composition and conversation. Students develop the craft to make intentional musical choices, but also the ability to articulate those choices, respond to collaborators, revise when the story demands it, and recognize when music should lead… and when it should leave space.
Technology is part of that practice, not separate from it. DAWs, notation, virtual instruments, recording, editing, and production provide the means to move between an idea and what collaborators actually hear. The goal is not simply technical fluency, but the ability to use those tools in service of a creative intention.
Scoring is both composition and conversation.
READING THE SCENE
STORY
What is happening—and what is changing?
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PERSPECTIVE
Whose experience are we following?
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FUNCTION
What can music contribute that the scene does not already provide?
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CHOICE
How can rhythm, melody, harmony, texture, timbre, and form serve that function?
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COLLABORATION
Listen. Communicate. Respond. Revise.
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REALIZATION
Carry the idea through composition, production, and delivery.
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The musical question begins with the story.
CREATIVE INQUIRY
PRACTICE BECOMES INQUIRY.
My creative practice and teaching continually inform one another. Questions that emerge through composing, about narrative, memory, identity, place, collaboration, and how audiences make meaning through sound, become questions I can explore more deliberately through creative work and bring back into the classroom.
My developing creative inquiry grows from the intersection of composition, storytelling, and lived experience, exploring questions of migration, displacement, memory, place, and belonging. Composition becomes not simply an artistic outcome, but a way of asking questions and investigating how stories can be carried through sound.
That cycle matters to me as an educator. Students should encounter a field that is still being questioned, expanded, and reinvented. My role is not only to teach established techniques, but to model the curiosity, experimentation, reflection, and collaboration that sustain a creative life.
Every new story creates another question worth exploring.