Father McKenzie Music

Teaching Music

Music Theory

I have taught the entire music theory "core" curriculum, from basic diatonic tonality to set theory. I teach my students that music theory is not dogma: it is a vibrant, complex, and sometimes messy synthesis of the insights and practical performance practices of centuries of musicians. Thus, I encourage my students to engage critically with music theory and practices. I ask my classes to question the emotional and spatial metaphors that underpin many musical concepts—to introspect about their own phenomenal experience and ask: Do they feel the leading tone "pull" towards the tonic? Does a minor subdominant chord in a major context seem "borrowed"? I invite them to question these descriptions and invent their own alternatives: For example, I ask them to reflect on physical metaphors, such as pitch moving "up and down" or music "tensing and relaxing," to invent their own alternative metaphors, and to discuss how their new metaphor might influence how we analyze or experience music. When students understand music theory as something to engage with critically, question, think about, and puzzle over, they are more engaged and motivated to find out for themselves how music theory is relevant to them.

I am an advocate of progressive changes to the traditional music theory curriculum, downplaying part-writing and making popular and vernacular music central, rather than secondary.

Music Practice

For many years, I taught rock/pop performance, songwriting, and recording as part of the Be In Your Own Band afterschool program in Santa Cruz, CA. I now lead Georgia Tech's Rock and Pop Ensemble, and teach our primary courses in recording, mixing, and live sound reinforcement—in Spring 2019, I will be leading the Georgia Tech Technology Ensemble in an exploration of rule-based and data-driven algorithmic composition. I believe that knowledge of music technology, vernacular music, and world music are all essential to professional success as a musician, or scholarly success as a researcher, in the 21st century.

Syllabi

Check out these actual, and proposed, university course syllabi:

Actual

Proposed

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.