Two jobs, one belief
You can’t fix what you haven’t diagnosed, and you can’t tune a sound that hasn’t been built yet. Intonation is a byproduct of good wind playing — chase the characteristic sound first, the pitch follows. The same logic governs the elementary classroom: children do music before they know it. Speech scaffolds sound, sound scaffolds movement, and the scaffolding falls away as the music goes inside. Phyllis Weikart’s four-step shows me how. Feierabend’s tuneful, beatful, artful tells me where I’m headed.
A few things I keep returning to
- Behavior before knowledge. Kids — and undergraduates, and conductors — do it before they name it.
- Sequence before shortcut. You don’t address matching pitch before a characteristic tone, or syncopation before steady beat.
- Isolate before integrate. One skill at a time, in clean air, before you stack.
- Transfer is the test. A vocab quiz isn’t an assessment; observed transfer to a new context is.
The north star
The work isn’t K–12 music. It’s K–12-and-beyond. The point of teaching a child to sing in tune, or a college student to teach a child to sing in tune, is not the recital — it’s the next forty Octobers. Sing · Say · Dance · Play names the texture I’m trying to leave in the room: students, teachers, and ensemble directors who stay musically active for the rest of their lives. Musical emancipation, not musical schooling.
What I’m working on
I keep returning to one question in my research: why do people spend years learning an instrument — or training to teach music — only to quit just as the going gets good? I want to understand the version of music education that loses people right at the threshold of mastery, and the version that keeps them.
Where I come from
Public-school classrooms and university podiums. Years of conducting youth, school, and community ensembles. I live in Grand Junction, CO with my family, and I’m always learning a new tune.