At my previous teaching position, I developed and co-taught the four-semester curriculum in music theory. For more than twenty years, I taught in all levels of the sequence, including fundamentals of... musicianship through chromatic harmony and formal principles. The theory classes were always relatively small, so they were conducted more as seminar style. Because of the often-intimidating nature of theory, I regularly worked with individual students to clarify issues and help them gain confidence. read more

Greetings! I'm Andrew, from Hagerstown, Maryland. I've had more than few years of great experiences standing in front of college classrooms, teaching everything from music history and theory to art ... and civilization in the twentieth century. I had an old grad school professor who used to say, "Musicians are applied historians." To me, that means that teaching history and the arts is about far more than dates, names, titles, and technical stuff. While those things are important, the magic of learning about these topics happens when you discover that they were made by people living in real times, with real hopes, joys, and fears - and that the arts were a way to give these people a way to say something about their times that words might not fully capture. My challenge is to help you discover this, too. Because I am also a performing musician - I am an orchestral, opera, and choral conductor - music and history are something living and constantly changing. To truly appreciate the art means to understand the history that produced it. That means I have spent a great effort reading about and teaching not only about the art itself, but about the historical world - the politics, the philosophy, the events - surrounding it. Teaching is best when it's a dialogue between instructor and student, and there is no better way to have that dialogue than when the teaching is one-on-one!read more