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Read testimonials from former students.
“Dr. White is one of the best professors at Wash U. He is humorous, understanding, really good at teaching, and pushes his students just enough. This is the most I’ve grown musically in a long time.”
With twenty years of experience, I have a strong record of excellence as a music educator. I have taught composition, theory, aural skills, and other music courses at Northwestern University, Washington University in St. Louis, the New College of Florida, and the Boston Conservatory. I also directed the pre-college music theory and composition program in the Tuition-free Conservatory at the Merit School of Music in Chicago for six years, and I have taught adult and pre-college students at Access Contemporary Music of Chicago, People’s Music School of Chicago, the Boston Conservatory High School Summer Intensive, and the New York Philharmonic’s “Very Young Composers” program, as well as elementary school general music in the Boston Public Schools.
As a transmasculine singer, I also teach voice lessons, particularly for trans- and gender-nonconforming students. I have received training and taught at The Voice Lab, an acclaimed Chicago voice studio serving our community, and I have created and taught a Voice and Gender college course that offers group training in gender-affirming voice alongside gender studies, physical embodiment practices, and wide-ranging study of speech and vocal music.
Through Zoom, I teach online private lessons in voice, composition, arranging, music theory, ear training, and sight singing for all ages and experience levels. My voice students are interested in exploring their speaking voices, their singing voices, or both, and they come from a wide range of gender experiences and music experiences (including no music experience at all.) My composition students create music across an unlimited range; they are classical composers, jazz musicians, film composers, singer-songwriters, producers of pop, EDM, and experimental electronic music, and more. College and graduate school applicants who have studied with me have been accepted to composition programs at the New England Conservatory, CalArts, Indiana University, the University of Southern California, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and NYU’s graduate studios in concert composition and screen scoring, among others.
“LJ is a phenomenal teacher. Music theory is rarely taught well, and before this class I found it intimidating and mystifying. He really helped us understand what we were doing and apply each tool in a variety of ways.”
“One of the most organized, customized classes I’ve ever taken.”
“The lessons provided me with concrete feedback on how to improve in both the short and long term.”
“If you want to do composition of any kind, Dr. White is the best you’ll find at Wash U. Part of what makes him a great teacher is how diverse his musical taste is. His awareness of styles beyond his makes him especially well-suited to working with students who work on diverse projects.”