About

Educator, musician, composer, and cat dad based outside of Philadelphia.

Music education has always been about more than notes on a page to me. The music hall is where I learned perseverance, kindness, organization, and leadership. Music has that special power. It can teach you things even when you are not fully paying attention. Music has kept me curious and eager to learn. Not just about pitches and rhythms but history, technology, and the great unsolved mysteries around us.

One of my favorite quotes comes from Theodore Roosevelt’s “Citizenship in a Republic” speech,

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

It is my hope as an educator to use music to help that person in the arena to know the “triumph of high achievement” and if not, to at least “fail while daring greatly”.

“KNOW WHAT'S WEIRD? DAY BY DAY, NOTHING SEEMS TO CHANGE. BUT PRETTY SOON, EVERYTHING'S DIFFERENT.” BILL WATTERSON