Keynote Speakers
Tradition and Transformation: Learning, Playing, and Teaching Outside the Box

photo Barry Bittman
Recreational Music Making: a Scientific Perspective for the Future

Dr. Bittman will present a comprehensive review of recreational music making (RMM) from an evidence-based perspective. He will discuss RMM's impact from bio-psycho-social perspectives, and will introduce his latest research in the context of stress reduction at the genomic level.

Barry Bittman, MD, is a neurologist, author, international speaker, award-winning producer/director, and inventor. With a focus on recreational music making, his latest research, a two-phase study, demonstrated for the first time that playing a musical instrument reverses multiple elements of the human stress response on the genomic level.

photo Robert Duke
Beautiful Teaching

Teachers who teach beautifully possess a deep understanding of music and of human learning. Much of their understanding may be intuited, perhaps especially the human learning stuff, but it is nevertheless fully learnable by others who aspire to teach beautifully.

Robert Duke is the Marlene and Morton Meyerson Centennial Professor of Music and Human Learning, University Distinguished Teaching Professor, and Director of the Center for Music Learning at The University of Texas at Austin. His most recent book is Intelligent Music Teaching: Essays on the Core Principles of Effective Instruction.

photo Martin E. Marty
Two Strangers at One Keyboard--the Musical Politics of "the Self" and "the Other"

Influenced by philosophers like Emanuel Levinas, Martin E. Marty has been working for several seasons on the concept of and relations to "the Other," that other being in some senses a stranger. He will discuss the ways in which otherness and strangerhood can be an asset in the teacher-student relation, but how it also has to be marked by counter-stranger approaches, including pedagogical "hospitality."

Describing himself as a "consumer" in the music world and husband of a music teacher, Dr. Marty is the Farfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago, where his vocation was and his writing in retirement is devoted to the study of religion-in-culture, a theme which allows him to pursue avocational interests in music and other arts. He has won the National Book Award and holds the National Medal of the Humanities, among other recognitions.

photo Angela Myles Beeching
Is What We Do Relevant?

A veteran career counselor helps us ponder whether teaching music matters. How do we assess the value of our work in today's world? How do we find satisfaction in our professional and personal lives? The session features career management tools and resources.

Angela Myles Beeching, Director of the New England Conservatory Career Services Center, has presented workshops for the National Association of Schools of Music, Chamber Music America, Eastman, Peabody, and Oberlin Conservatories. A Fulbright Scholar with a doctorate from SUNY Stony Brook, she is the author of Beyond Talent: Creating a Successful Career in Music (Oxford University Press, 2005).

photo Marienne Uszler
Outside the Box, Yes, but Which Box?

Each of us is "boxed in" to some degree. Expanding your own boundaries may challenge and surprise you. It's really a big, rich, vital world out there.

Marienne Uszler was editor of Piano & Keyboard and American Music Teacher, coauthor of The Well-Tempered Keyboard Teacher and Sound Choices, and recipient of the Frances Clark/MTNA Pedagogy Award (2006). She is retired from the University of Southern California where she served as Professor of Keyboard Studies and Director of Undergraduate Studies.