The Art of
Musical Architecture

I teach composition by taking things apart before putting them together. Every piece of music you admire — whether a Handel Passacaille, a Joe Hisaishi theme, or a four-bar blues riff — is built from the same raw materials: intervals, rhythm, harmonic motion, and silence. My method, Deconstruction and Reconstruction, begins with a work you already know and asks: what actually makes this sound the way it does? Strip it to its skeleton. Then rebuild it in your own voice, using the tools you have just uncovered.

One piece runs through almost every exercise in my arrangement series: the Passacaille from Handel's Suite HWV 432. Not because Handel is the most important composer in history, but because this eight-bar harmonic cycle is so elemental that it can carry almost anything — a minor blues, a medieval modal fragment, a pentatonic melody in the Japanese 羽 classification, a chord substitution that would feel at home in a Chopin nocturne. By working deeply with a single harmonic spine, you learn to hear the same structure in music separated by four centuries and several continents.

Every student I work with eventually receives exercises composed specifically for where they are in their development — not exercises from a published method book, but pieces I write for them. This is because the moment a student encounters a problem that no existing exercise addresses is exactly when the learning accelerates. My background as a working composer means I compose your exercises the way I compose for games and films: with real musical intention, not mechanical drilling.