University teaching and administration
Since 2006, I have been a faculty member at the University of California, Irvine, where I am a Professor in the Department of Music in the Claire Trevor School of the Arts. I enjoy teaching classes, ensembles and lessons across a variety of areas, including composition, improvisation, jazz, critical studies, aural skills, and networked music technology. I share many of my course syllabi on this website, because I have often benefited from seeing other people’s syllabi.
I’ve also been privileged to be able to help shape our programs and school through administrative work. Along with several colleagues, I helped create an MFA and now PhD program in Integrated Composition, Improvisation and Technology (ICIT), detailed below, and I currently serve as Chair of the Music Department, Jazz Program Coordinator, and Director of the Gassmann Electronic Music Studios.
PhD in Integrated Composition, Improvisation and Technology (ICIT)
In the UCI Music Department, I’m part of the core faculty for the PhD program in Integrated Composition, Improvisation and Technology” (ICIT). We created this novel program as an MFA in 2008 then converted it to a PhD in 2015. Helping grow and sustain ICIT with wonderful faculty and grad colleagues has been deeply rewarding, especially learning from all the incredible work that our students have done.
The current core ICIT faculty are Kojiro Umezaki, Mari Kimura, Rajna Swaminathan and myself, and past core faculty include Christopher Dobrian, Nicole Mitchell, Kei Akagi, Lukas Ligeti and Rae Linda Brown. [Photo from ICIT’s 15th Anniversary celebration in 2024.]
Puentes Telemáticos / Telematic Bridges
In 2017, Mario Humberto Valencia, Juan David Rubio, Tata Ceballos and I started this program, which links music students from Santa Ana High School in California with peers in Colombia, exploring the pedagogical and intercultural potentials of telepresent collaboration. We’ve run it as a summer program several times, and are working on redesigning it with a year-long format.
We designed Puentes to offer students musical experiences that differ from what they get in school music programs, such as learning improvisation and composition. We also want to give them relatively unstructured access to the high quality telepresence tools and labs that we use ourselves, and see what they do on their own. This program resonates with values and approaches some researchers now call Connected Learning, and at UC Irvine, I am affiliated with the Connected Learning Lab, which “is dedicated to studying and mobilizing learning technologies in equitable, innovative, and learner-centered ways.”