Personal Statement

A passion for music: listening, practicing, rehearsing, exploring, discussing, and sharing. A passion for connecting with and learning from the diverse, inner selves of hobbyist and professional musicians in my community. A passion for reaching out to an audience, for creating an aesthetic experience, for building a moment of transcendent beauty, and for feeling the audience respond viscerally. Most of all, a passion for sharing these rich outer experiences and rewarding inner journeys with young people through the amazing and magical medium of music. This is my mission, my purpose, and my reason for bouncing out of bed every morning.

My name is Cary, and I teach music to young people.

I have long known that the sharing of music would be my life's work. Since seventh grade, when I suddenly froze while packing my instrument at the end of Mr. A's middle school band class and realized that music had been by far the happiest moment of my day. Since twelfth grade, when Mr. RK patiently recorded and re-recorded my university audition, long past the agreed upon lesson time, teaching me to control my nerves and coaching me to a scholarship. Since freshman year of university, when Dr. L marched our band of 230 into the university's 40,000-seat stadium and we proceeded to rile up the sold-out crowd until waves of vibration crashed tangibly into our bodies. Since Dr. RWS took me on my second US-nationwide tour, sixty days of grit and sweat and poverty which glued our scrappy little troupe together for a lifetime of road stories and reunions, and which modeled for me how, by sowing artistic ownership across a field of many members, organizations can harvest exponential creativity.

These powerful experiences shaped who I have grown up to be. All of these powerful experiences were made for my peers and me by elder musicians who went out of their way to provide these experiences to young people. Now I am the elder, and I have the privilege of paying these powerful growth opportunities forward to a new generation of young people. Most of my students will not become professional music performers or teachers. Rather, my students will carry our shared aesthetic experiences into their adult lives as workers, leaders, spouses, parents, neighbors and citizens. The enduring understandings of music study include work ethic, goal setting, strategic practice, empathy, perseverance, collaboration and more. A successful Cary alumnus, twenty years later, carries on informed musical conversations at cocktail parties; buys season tickets to their local symphony or opera; and plays their instrument a couple of times a week for wellness and personal satisfaction.

The next phase of my journey as a music educator will take me to a new city in the world with its own new opportunities and new challenges, at an international school which prizes a progressive philosophy and a down-to-earth, student-centered mission. I care less about the size of my next school and more about finding an excellent music teaching situation with collaborative colleagues. I am geographically open-minded.

I will bring my wife Tania, an experienced Montessori teacher and now a certified Montessori teacher trainer. I will bring my daughter Athena, class of 2025, who lives for visual art and theater and who loves to volunteer with animals and younger children.