UC Irvine
I’m a professor at the University of California, Irvine, and currently chair of the Department of Music in the Claire Trevor School of the Arts. I teach a wide range of topics and share some of my course syllabi on this page. It’s a privilege to work in various roles at UCI, and to have opportunities to help build programs and partnerships like the ones detailed below.
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. To see the breadth of that work, check out our library’s collection of ICIT theses and dissertations.
The current core ICIT faculty are Kojiro Umezaki, Rajna Swaminathan and myself, and past core faculty include Christopher Dobrian, Mari Kimura, Nicole Mitchell, Lukas Ligeti, Kei Akagi and Rae Linda Brown.
[Photo from ICIT’s 15th Anniversary celebration in 2024.]
Cauces Sónicos / Sonic Channels (2025-26)
Cauces Sónicos: Creative Music Making Across the Borderlands is a 2-year project I’m co-directing with Wilfrido Terrazas, a creative flutist-improviser and professor at UCSD. Funded mainly through a Latino Studies Research Project award from UC’s Alianza MX Initiative, Cauces has several integrated layers including creating new artistic works with a collective of professional artists from across the Baja California and Southern California region, teaching undergrads through a collaborative course across UABC in Ensenada, UC Irvine and UC San Diego, and community engagement projects. We’ll have more details and documentation to share here soon.
[Photo of undergrad music students from CA/MX during a collaborative workshop day at UCSD, 2025]
Puentes Telemáticos / Telematic Bridges (2017-2022)
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 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 I’ve been inspired to learn about through my affiliation with UCI’s Connected Learning Lab, which “is dedicated to studying and mobilizing learning technologies in equitable, innovative, and learner-centered ways.” We ran Puentes as a multi-week summer program in 2017, 2018, 2021 and 2022.