Teacher

I got my first taste of teaching in middle school, when my choir director asked me (the designated piano player) to run sectionals. I'm still ignited by helping other people get better at making music. I've taught kids (as young as five),  amateur adults, and working musicians. At the college level, I've taught 79 sections of nineteen different courses, at six different institutions. As of Fall, 2023, I'm a Lecturer of Music at Mount Holyoke College. I previously taught for three years at Oberlin Conservatory and six years at the University of West Georgia, where I was both the music theorist and the Director of Jazz Studies.

In recent years, much of my attention has been devoted to issues of equity in music instruction. My mission is to reform music curricula to ensure that students encounter all kinds of music and musical creators - not just the European-oriented ones that dominate music education. To those ends, I try to share not only my thought processes (often under @bengeyer on Twitter), but also many of my teaching materials, curricular structures, and instructional policies.

The centerpiece of this work is my free textbook, Music Theory in Mind and Culture, (2021) which has been used at DePauw University, the University of New Hampshire, Ithaca College, the University of Michigan, and other institutions. I hope Music Theory in Mind and Culture can offer both a model for how a more equitable music theory curriculum might be designed, and the practical materials for its implementation.