“The journey is the reward.”
— Zen proverb 

Welcome to my personal website. I am a music scholar, guitarist, and educator working at the intersection of research, performance, and pedagogy. Here I outline the core research interests, educational perspectives, and musical experiences developed through my journey across diverse cultures in the world. 

My research work is situated within the ongoing debate surrounding how musicians transmit and embody musical knowledge within various socio-cultural settings and multiscale learning ecologies in Afro-Atlantic traditions. In this context, I enquire how musicians develop musical expertise through landscapes of practice – with a special focus on Cuban musical practices.

I also trace how musicians come to integrate enculturative and embodied experiences with notation-based learning epistemologies as a model for understanding the complementarity between informal practices in African-diasporic traditions and formal Western-art music training, drawing insights into multimodal approaches to music learning. 

Working across ethnomusicology and music education, I draw on situated learning, 4E cognitive science, and phenomenology  to examine the interplay between musical practices, the lived corporeality in music-dance genres, and learning as enacted within the embodied, phenomenological life-world of musicians. 

In turn, I am fascinated by how these disciplinary lenses can be significantly informed by musical practices and the dynamic coupling they enact. Furthermore, I am stimulated by how the multimodal approaches observed in Cuban learning ecologies may also offer perspectives on the diverse possibilities that exists in other musical traditions. 

As a musician, my development was shaped first by the technical and stylistic affordances of the classical (nylon-strung), acoustic (steel-strung), and electric guitar, and later by the demands of session work. Together, these led to a musical interest that spans from US-American, Brazilian, and Cuban music to contemporary acoustic guitar, and the classical guitar repertoire. 

These musical genres guided me towards a versatile approach to guitar playing and a global perspective on music cultures, and instilled the stylistic responsiveness that granted me sustained professional access to a wide range of musical contexts internationally. These included orchestral production shows, sideman work, jazz ensembles, and dance sets. 

Finally, this performance experience – coupled with my studies in music education – has informed my instrumental teaching, which I apply in community settings. Parallel to this, I am oriented towards higher education, where I aim to share my knowledge and insights through lectures, seminars, and workshops.