Teaching is my favorite thing — more beloved even than playing concerts, more than rehearsing, more than snuggling my dog. Well — okay — I do not, actually, love it more than snuggling my dog. But I love it more than reading poetry, smelling fresh flowers, tomato sauce with butter and onions, or swimming in the Atlantic Ocean: what I mean to say is, I love it more than most everything.

My teaching — short-term, long-term, one-off, momentary — is all empathy. But it is empathy mixed with a passionate and deeply-honed love for practical, healthy problem solving. I believe that everyone can grow, and I believe that, if we can slow our processes down and look with detail and generosity, we can always find greater efficiency, a wider range of options, more infinite colors. Teaching exists at the center of so much that matters to me in the world: deep artistic exploration; thoughtful analysis, in turn granular and global; and seeing, bearing witness to, and helping other human beings get closer to who they truly are and want to be. Teaching helps me grow, too: the people I teach lead me endlessly to windows of exploration that I would never have found on my own; to ask more questions and keep finding more different, personal, ever-changing answers and ways of explaining what we do as cellists and musicians.

I believe my work as a teacher is primarily as an enabler: as someone who can watch and listen to a student and see the vision and dream for where they want to go. I am not someone who wants or needs you to agree with me — no!!! — but I will show you ways to read a score that I have thought about over many years studying different composers’ languages, and that might help you in exploring and finding your own interpretive way. Physical advice is my bread and butter (my favorite): for as much as I believe in all the ineffable, lofty things that music can do, I also believe there are concrete physical ways to make our imaginations go there — and I believe we are at our best when our musical and technical toolboxes are in conversation. It is one of my favorite conversations of all: I love to help students find a concrete way to make exactly the sound they want, and especially to help them build a physical memory for how to reproduce it again later, when they are on their own.

I am someone whose artistic imagination has, for much of my life, lived several steps — sometimes it felt like several years — ahead of my physical and technical confidence at the cello. And I believe very strongly, from my own experience getting better at the instrument and helping other people get better too, that using that artistic imagination as a guidebook and path to growth is the best way to work. My experience as a teacher is deep, ongoing, and something I am proud of; but my experience — my ongoing quest, every day — in working to become a better cellist, listener, colleague, and musician is what gives me the best tools to help.

It is one of the vast, immeasurable, infinite gifts of my life that I have gotten to study with a handful of musicians whose teaching changed my life: the lessons and coaching with whom will be part of me and my own teaching forever. So I want to name those people, those elements, those lighthouses and guiding stars, here:

• When I talk to students about phrasing, I talk to them about Seymour Lipkin, who showed and continues to show me what pulse and inflection do to create phrase, truth, and magic; Laurie Smukler – perhaps the person who has been most steadfastly sure I would be the best version of myself, someday – is with me when I try to describe the subtlest, most nuanced ways that our bodies and hearts influence the sounds we make.

• Brian Alegant’s tools for using music theory analysis to inform interpretive decisions and reading of a score are with me not just as I do that work myself but as I help students to do it more deeply; and so too are the ways that Don Weilerstein evoked, constantly and in the most humane, personal way, a sense of true awe and reverence in the face of the great music we get to hold in our hands each day.

• Some of my exuberance about music and the cello are innate, and some of it I call up from people who modeled that for me in the most inspiring and profound ways: Barbara Mallow, with her boundless, heart-stopping love for music and the human beings who make it come alive; Darrett Adkins with his buoyancy and hopefulness, and his unending belief that everyone can get better with simple, deep, hard work; Geoff Nuttall, whose way of describing and evoking the music we studied with him were as sharply etched, deeply memorable, and vividly joyous as his own music-making.

• Natasha Brofsky, my cello teacher for three years, modeled for me the power of truly listening to your students, taking them seriously, and holding them responsible for – believing they were capable of – their work.

• Vivian Weilerstein’s ferocious, unwavering belief in me, on that same token, brings me to tears more than a decade later: it was a kind of teaching – aside from how truly inspiring, enabling, and thrilling the trio coachings with her were over three years – that changed my life, to know that someone in the world could believe in me more than I believed in myself; it was a kind of teaching I dream of and hope to add to the world in what small glimpses I possibly can.

• And: my Dad is, very simply, the most miraculous teacher of music that I have ever known. When I think about the ways he both describes what has to happen musically and enables students – technically, artistically, in their own unique voices – to navigate the music they are exploring…I know that I have, just from seeing him teach, and being lucky enough to study Schubert, Bartók, and late Beethoven quartets with him over the years, a deep enough well of inspiration to draw from for my entire life at the cello and as a teacher. Add to that the conversations about music these last almost-forty yers: conversations over tea and toast with cheese, over smoked bluefish pâté and raw oysters, over coolers filled with napa cabbage and gochugaru, up to our elbows in fresh kimchi; and I am lucky, I know – lucky in a way I’ll probably spend that entire life trying to describe – to have absorbed and built a values system as a teacher and a musician that will be, in part, on some level, forever entwined with this person.

Seeing this list – writing this list, trying to give voice to this list of people who have changed and enabled my life and the specifics of how they did that – it makes me aware all over again, though I think of them every day, of the pure luck and profound gift of their presence in my life. These are people whose words, imaginations, and belief in me have been necessary building blocks to my life at the cello, and whose very specific gifts to me echo, I hope, in my own teaching. 

This field we are in is often so deeply disheartening, so uninclusive, so competitive; so many of the classical music and classical musician narratives revolve around a lifestyle that is explicitly unhealthy – that excludes a life away from the instrument, that ignores one’s own physical body, that thinks all learning should happen in a certain systematized way that simply doesn’t work for everyone. There is a culture of casual cruelty, casual sexism, casual racism, classism, victim-blaming, and closed-mindedness that are pervasive and horrifying: elements that stay with students and so often (with me, too, for many years) lodge themselves in students’ bodies and psyches as trauma and self-doubt in long-term ways. So when I work with my students – and when, inevitably, I recall and evoke some of the truly great and life-giving teaching I have been so lucky to absorb over my musical life – I am acutely aware of the deep and powerful responsibility it is to explore music with young people. This work is a privilege I do not take lightly; it is work to which I try to bring my very best, most creative, most open-hearted self every day, and work that I do with immense joy, curiosity, and love.