Jared Lee Knight

My students receive highly individualized instruction. Because every student is different and therefore has different needs, one of the first things I try to do when working with a new student is to accurately assess what his/her interests and goals are. Some of the questions that I try to answer include the following: What does this student hope to gain from enrolling in private music lessons? What are his/her short-term and long-term goals in music? Does this student hope to eventually pursue music academically and/or professionally? What styles/genres of music interest him/her the most? After getting a sense of what the student's interests are and what he/she hopes to accomplish, I work individually with the student to select materials (e.g., music books, solo repertoire, software) that will be appropriate for his/her lesson type, current skill level, interests, and goals for the future. These materials will change periodically to ensure that the student continues to progress in lessons and beyond.

From 2018 to 2023, I completed graduate coursework in music composition and intermedia music technology at the University of Oregon School of Music and Dance, where I studied acoustic composition with Robert Kyr and David Crumb, and electronic composition with Jeffrey Stolet. From 2014 to 2018, I studied music at Boise State University, where I graduated with the Bachelor of Music degree in Music Composition. While at Boise State, I studied composition with David Biedenbender, Sam L. Richards, Eric Alexander, and J. Wallis Bratt; piano with Del Parkinson; jazz piano with Chuck Smith; and euphonium with Sarah Paradis. From 2011 to 2013, I studied music at Brigham Young University—Idaho, where I studied composition with Darrell Brown; euphonium with Golden Lund and Matthew Moore; and piano with Lori Ann Morris.

My current lesson rates are $30/lesson for 30-minute lessons, $45/lesson for 45-minute lessons, and $60/lesson for 60-minute lessons. I have my students pay for at least 5 lessons at a time ("lesson packs"), although I do offer discounts to students who pay for more than 5 lessons at a time (in increments of 5 lessons, up to 30 at a time, a.k.a., "multi-packs"). With very few exceptions, I do not offer the option of paying for 1 lesson at a time. For my students who request in-home lessons, I do charge a "teacher travel fee" (TTF) that is based on the distance from my residence to the student's residence. This fee helps to ensure that I can continue to offer in-home lessons as an option for current and prospective students. I accept payment via Square (credit or debit card), Cash App, Venmo, and Apple Pay.

I started teaching private piano lessons in 2010, and for the first few years, I primarily taught young beginners. I very quickly grew to love private teaching. I love music on a very deep and intense level, and having the opportunity to help kids grow to love music, too, has been extremely rewarding to me. Over the last several years, I have changed what kinds of lessons I offer, based on what I felt like I was qualified to teach. For a few years, this also included lessons in saxophone, euphonium, and trombone, although I eventually stopped teaching those instruments once I felt like my levels of proficiency in those areas were insufficient. Over the last few years, I've narrowed my focus to piano, composition, and electronic music. For piano, I offer lessons both in classical piano and in jazz piano, with the option of doing hybrid lessons (both styles concurrently). For composition lessons, students are welcome to focus on just about any style, medium, or instrumentation/ensemble type of their choosing. And when it comes to electronic music, I teach mostly from an electroacoustic composition standpoint (which involves heavy emphases on sound design, programming with Max/MSP, data-driven instrument performance, and fixed media/sound art compositions), but I also teach from the standpoint of electronic production in popular music genres (e.g., using a DAW to create EDM, IDM, ambient music, cinematic music, etc.).

I have worked with students ranging in skill level from beginning to advanced, ranging in age from children to middle-aged adults, and ranging from in-person lessons to lessons online with domestic and international student Many of the students that I have worked with have dealt with some form of mental illness (including depression, anxiety, OCD, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia) and/or neurodevelopmental disorder (including autism and ADHD), and I was able to help most of them find ways to work around these difficulties so that they could maintain a healthy relationship with music while still making progress in ways that were important to them.

In June 2023, I had the opportunity to travel to New York for the 2023 New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival (NYCEMF 2023), to perform one of my data-driven instrument compositions. My composition, titled A Good Crescendo is Swell, is a sort of duet between one live performer (myself) and the computer. While the computer outputs the "swells" (a series of algorithmically generated, microtonally tuned sawtooth wave clusters that tenuously crescendo into existence and diminuendo back out), I improvise with custom, "found sound" percussion samples using a Wacom drawing tablet. It's a very fun piece to perform. The first several versions of A Good Crescendo is Swell were designed for stereo output (one left speaker and one right speaker). However, leading up to NYCEMF 2023, I made a host of revisions to the programming so that I could perform this piece with a quadraphonic array (four speakers: front left, front right, back left, back right). This really elevated my experience at NYCEMF. It became exciting not just because I got to perform at a major electroacoustic music festival, but also because it became my first time ever performing a quadraphonic composition.

I would highly recommend listening to recordings of the teacher's compositions and/or playing. While the quality of the teacher's music doesn't always translate into him/her being a good teacher, I think it is extremely important for a student to know what kinds of things the teacher is doing. Often, it leads to increased inspiration and motivation within the student.

Before talking to teachers about their needs, students should consider what their own idiosyncracies are and what they want to accomplish. In other words, if a student is especially prone toward anxiety, talking frankly with the teacher about what triggers that anxiety can help the teacher be more mindful and effective in guiding the student's learning process. Additionally, students should think through what their short-term and long-term goals are within music. If the teacher knows what the student wants to learn or how they want to improve, he/she is more adequately empowered to tailor the lessons to the student's interests.