Father McKenzie Music

Teaching

As a university instructor, I believe my chief responsibility is to foster independent, self-motivated learning, and inquisitive, critical thinking. I teach my students to think independently while engaging with their community of peers. I tap into my students passion to motivate them to learn. I teach them to be inquisitive and to think critically; to ask good questions and to be skeptical of answers.

I've had the pleasure of teaching music at four different universities—the University of California at Santa Cruz, the Ohio State University, McGill University, and the Georgia Institute of Technology—and in K–12 after-school programs and in private lessons. I am also passionate about teaching scientific research methodologies, especially statistics.

Rap Science

Harmonic Analysis

Highlife

Research

As a researcher, I combine humanistic and scientific methodologies in the study of music. Specifically, I engage in computational modeling of symbolic music data and behavioral experimentation with human participants. The questions and ideas I explore are all grounded in, informed by, and evaluated in light of, fundamentally humanistic music theory.

Music

I am an active musician and composer. As a guitarist, bassist, and drummer/percussionist, I play a variety of musics, mostly American vernacular music (rock, pop, hip-hop) and world music—I am also a trained classical guitarist. As a composer, I synthesize common-practice, popular, and world musics, especially focusing on sophisticated rhythm and tempo relationships, inspired by Indonesian Gamelan music.

Pedagogy

I've had the pleasure of music at four different universities, and with K-12 kids in afterschool classes and private lessons. I've taught entire music theory curricula, classes in music technology and music cognition,, and rock/pop music performance. I also love to teach scientific research methodologies, especially statistics, and programming.