with Zach Phillips | ||
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about my teaching practice: -- I have around twelve years of experience working with students of all ages and experience levels. is keyboard not your primary instrument? that's not a problem, just please have access to one for lesson purposes. whatever the complexity of the material we're tackling and whatever your background, my emphasis is on building goal-oriented syncretic exercises that meld harmonic theory, technique, improvisation, writing and analysis parameters: -- lessons are one hour but tend to run a little long. I never conclude a lesson without feeling a student has concrete understanding of specific procedures that should help them gain new ground. I'm open to weekly or biweekly lessons where indicated but my teaching is designed in such a way that one-offs and occasional lessons are meant to be as useful as possible to the student -- lessons can take place at my studio in Brooklyn, NY or remotely via Google Meet / Zoom etc -- my rate is $100 per lesson specialties / about me: I've been teaching myself theory through songwriting for my entire adult life. eventually, I came to realize that some dimensions of my approach to songwriting can be systematized into a pedagogical tool that provides a nice counterpoint to the way theory is traditionally taught and which has proven accessible and useful to musicians more athletically experienced than myself and to relative beginners alike. after years of teaching, my lessons have started to become streamlined into a generalized trajectory that I adapt to each student's musical situation and needs. some interests include: thinking beyond conventional circle-of-fifths/fourths motion; arbitrary limitations; secondariness & relational thinking; polytonality; pedal-point & common-tone progressions; unforced novelty; modular/associative concept-building; fruitful wrongness & productive error; learning to better enjoy & use ambivalence & ambiguity; the psychodynamics of writing under depressurized constraint; and so on. contact me! why not? |