Where Worlds
Converge

Most music schools offer you a choice: piano technique or composition theory. The assumption is that these are separate disciplines requiring separate teachers and separate syllabi. In my experience as a working composer, they are the same activity approached from different angles. When I sit at the piano to compose, I am using technique to explore harmony in real time. When I perform, I am hearing the music as an arrangement problem — what is the most revealing way to voice this chord? The Hybrid Course dissolves that boundary by design.

My own music lives at the intersection of Japanese aesthetics, Nordic restraint, and French classical rigour. I find mono no aware — the bittersweet beauty of things that do not last — in a Chopin harmonic suspension, in a single chord from a Joe Hisaishi melody, in the way a Dorian mode cadence refuses to fully resolve. The Hybrid Course is built around this intersection: for the student who wants to compose music with emotional depth across multiple traditions, rather than being fluent in only one.

A typical session moves through three phases without hard stops between them. We might begin with a technical passage — Liszt's fingering in La Campanella, say — and discover that the physical problem is a compositional problem: Liszt is creating tension through register and texture, not just velocity. From there we move into an arrangement exercise, applying that same textural tension to your own material. By the end of the session, you have practised piano, studied composition, and produced a fragment of your own work. These are not separate events.