Most aspiring young composers sooner or later realize that teaching is inexorably linked with their artistic career. I came to this realization at the age of seventeen, when I held my first teaching job as an elementary piano and theory teacher at Athenaeum Conservatory in Athens, Greece. Ever since, I have taught in a variety of capacities and institutions, ranging from private tutor for elementary piano to instructor in advanced theory and composition. Throughout my own schooling, I was exposed to two radically different types of learning institutions: conservatories and liberal arts colleges. Moreover, one of the most formative parts of my musical education occurred under private tutors. My teaching philosophy, progressively forged throughout the last ten years, is the resultant of all these diverse learning and teaching experiences as well as a reflection of my own development as an artist. To talk about my teaching philosophy, therefore, is to talk about how I view myself as a musician, and how I perceive music as a subject of discourse.

First, I strongly believe that before one can approach music as an art, one must be versatile in music as a craft. My teaching approach focuses on mastering technical aspects of music even at a very early stage of a student’s progress. To this effect, I emphasize the importance of developing musicianship skills. These skills include the ability of students to conceptualize musical relationships upon hearing a piece of music, the ability to perform an excerpt accurately, particularly at first sight, and the ability to process a complex musical text and reduce it to its constituent parts. In developing these skills, I spend a lot of time on ear-training, rhythmic and score-reading exercises. I present these exercises in small steps, gradually increasing the level of difficulty. When I assign seemingly impossible tasks, I frequently introduce them by asking the question: “How would I practice this?” I then proceed to show students how to break down the bigger task into small, manageable steps and then put them together in order to execute it. In my experience, students learn much more effectively when I teach by example, especially when the task in hand is a complex one.

Another central element to studying the craft of music is understanding the music of the past. This is traditionally done through learning Western compositional techniques of the last four centuries and through analyzing repertory. Coming from a conservatory background, I believe that the best way in acquiring the compositional techniques of the past is through imitation. I therefore prefer assigning beginner students short composition exercises to papers. In these exercises, students are required to demonstrate their knowledge of a particular form or technique through compositions of their own invention. At the same time, I try to avoid giving students the impression that learning music is a sequence of studies in style. To this effect, I devote a considerable amount of time in exploring the interconnectedness of compositional techniques throughout the Western canon, and where applicable, across different cultures. For example, in a recent lecture on isorhythm, a compositional technique based on the reiteration of a sequence of note durations, I presented my students with examples of isorhythm from the Mediaeval Ages, Central Africa and the late twentieth century European avant-garde. By drawing on the interconnectedness of musical languages, I strive to induce my students to creatively assimilate compositional techniques according to their own aesthetic pursuits.

As far as analysis is concerned, I advocate a detail-oriented and contextually based analysis. I urge my students to be dubious about traditional morphology and to avoid relying on preconceived reductive methodologies and structural orthodoxies. I am equally skeptical towards modes of analysis that rely on applications of analytical models from other disciplines, especially from literary theory. On the contrary, I insist that students begin their analysis based exclusively on the musical relationships manifested in the work under scrutiny. Of particular interest to my analytical approach is examining the interaction between all parameters of music (such as pitch, rhythm, timbre, etc.) in establishing the content and form of a piece. In this respect, I induce students to look at music as a temporal art, evaluating the moment-by-moment decision of the composer and reconstructing the overall architecture of the piece as the sum total of these decisions.

Second, I provide close supervision to the individual progress of each student. Fortunately, the limited enrollment of each class I have taught has allowed me to meet with each students several times during the semester. Apart from responding to students’ class-related questions, I use individual meetings as a means of evaluation. In this respect, students are assigned exercises catered to their level of proficiency, which they are expected to submit or perform during our individual meetings. I also tend to give my classes frequent short quizzes and one final cumulative exam. During the semester, I like to devote one or two quizzes to test the overall potential of the class. The latter are graded according to their level of difficulty and present the students with challenging tasks, the completion of which requires them to have internalized the course material at a very deep level. In addition to the above, I frequently meet with students to talk about their musical interests, advise them in terms of their individual musical pursuits and suggest works and theoretical texts for further study.

Third, I endorse challenges. Conventional wisdom suggests using a limited repertory for teaching purposes and is restricted to works that can be easily analyzed using traditional theoretical models. I prefer exposing students to music that broadens their horizons and challenges their perception of limits, thereby allowing them to imagine a world of infinitely rich possibilities. One of the assignments of my current theory course is to perform an excerpt from Xenakis’ ‘Rebonds A’, a masterpiece for solo percussion that daunts even the most experienced performers. Upon hearing the work in class, there was an overwhelming feeling of awe among the students, followed by the question “how is this possible”? After analyzing the excerpt step by step, the majority of students were capable of performing it by the next class. I find that this experience is not uncommon; when faced with challenges that stimulate their interest most students have an impressive ability to rise to the occasion.

Finally, I ascribe a lot of importance to being a team player within my department. By that I mean working closely with the course supervisor, fellow instructors and departmental staff in addressing difficulties and receiving advice on how to smoothly run each course. Balancing a successful academic and teaching career as a graduate student relies to a great extent on avoiding reinventing the wheel. In that light, I consult with previous instructors about syllabi, exercises and workload before planning the outline of a course and adding my own perspective. An equally important part of being a team player is to understand how the course one is teaching fits within the departmental syllabus, particularly if the course is a sequel. Since all of the courses I have taught at Penn belonged to the four-course music theory sequence, I made sure that students coming out of the lower level courses could easily take the higher level ones.

In conclusion, I regard teaching music as an integral component of being a composer and an artist. I see my time in the classroom as a vital link in the cultural process that culminates in the concert hall. During every class session, I hope to create at least one incendiary spark that will find its way in my students’ composition, performance, writing, or listening experience. As I teach every rudiment of music, I retrace my own steps from the very beginning, my initiation to music by my father, the overwhelming enthusiasm of first articulating an idea in sound. While I undergo this process, I discover together with and, in several cases, because of my students things I had never considered before. The most rewarding experience of teaching for me comes at such moments of reflexive conductivity, that start with a new concept introduced in class and end with the realization that students and teacher alike can understand and imagine music in a completely new way.