Educator/Innovator
John's work in education follows two general directions: helping listeners understand and enjoy music, and exploring ways to foster learning in any field—particularly learning that encourages both independent thinking and awareness of interdependence.
John has helped to design new concert formats for the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, Oregon BachFestival, Skaneateles Festival, Pacific Classical Winds, and XTET. He has given preconcert lectures at the Oregon Bach Festival and the Chamber Music Festival of the East. His week-long residency at the University of Oklahoma was called "Enlivening Live Music." He has been a featured speaker at the national conventions of Americans for the Arts, Chamber Music America, and the National Conference on Piano Pedagogy.
As Artist in Residence for two years at the Pasadena Conservatory of Music, John facilitated design teams of community members, parents, staff, and faculty to create new kinds of concert events and innovative enhancements for administration and teaching. (His paper about those projects, "Creative Teamwork," describes using artists' methods for organizational problem-solving.)
During the 1980s and '90s, John worked with computer scientists at Atari, Apple, and Disney Imagineering, consulting on projects for Alan Kay, one of the inventors of personal computing. While computer scientists developed new software for enduser programming and tested it with children and their teachers, John explored the effects of new and old technologies on learning and expression. He composed pieces involving computers, he programmed software for classroom use, and he researched creative thinking in classrooms with education researcher Doreen Nelson. He wrote about learning environments and about the possibilities and pitfalls of computer use in classrooms (see "Computers & Squeak as Environments for Learning." This is a PFD file--it requires Adobe Acrobat reader.)
John has served on the boards of Monday Evening Concerts, Renaissance Arts Academy, Pasadena Waldorf School, and the Design-Based Learning Laboratory at Art Center College of Design. He is a past board member of Chamber Music America.
He teaches at UCLA.