Sam Mukherji

Hello! I am a professor of music, specializing in music theory. I have advanced degrees in this subject, including a Ph.D. from Princeton University, and have over 20 years of experience teaching music theory - from introductory courses for high school students and college freshman, to graduate courses and doctoral supervision. I tend to focus on courses on basic music writing and analysis skills, such as harmony, counterpoint, and tonal form analysis. However, I also specialize in teaching various aspects of jazz, rock, and world music (especially Indian music).

My teaching philosophy and interests are best described as the result of my unconventional academic training as a music scholar. A successful career in music requires the mastery of certain, rather technical, musical skills that one normally acquires through a highly specialized musical education. In my case, this began with my formative experiences as a student of both Western and Indian musical performance, but continued with a rather atypical, and unusually broad, path of instruction—namely, one that involved an intense engagement with the humanities and cognitive sciences. This has culminated in my interest in approaches to scholarship and pedagogy in music theory that reveal a specialist‘s concern for depth as well as a generalist‘s concern for interdisciplinary breadth. In consequence, my teaching philosophy is one that aims to cultivate exactly these two qualities in my students. Therefore, the goal of the classes I teach is to help students master specialist skills in music analysis, composition and performance, while simultaneously situating this in-depth study within a broader scholastic context—particularly within disciplines that influence my own work, such as philosophy, linguistics, cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and evolutionary biology. The above approach to teaching has been influenced strongly by the specific teaching experiences I have had as well. Most of my teaching has been in a university setting, but outside of the university, I had taught high school students with learning disabilities and given private lessons in music theory and performance. Therefore, regardless of whether I am teaching an introductory music course to high school students or college freshman, or an advanced course for graduate and doctoral students, my focus is always to expose my students to a wide variety of ideas, disciplinary methodologies, and musical repertoires. I have realized this objective in my teaching experiences, for example, by instructing students in basic musicianship skills such as harmony and counterpoint, but from a perspective that involves the cross-idiomatic exploration of a variety of musical styles. And the focus here is not merely on intellectual or cultural diversity, but also on inclusion. One thing I have certainly learned in my own experiences as a student of music, and now a music teacher, is that teaching a subject from a variety of perspectives helps a student understand a topic better—especially if they come from diverse cultural backgrounds or have learning disabilities—since such a diversity of perspectives gives a student a variety of entry points into a discussion too, and lets them choose the perspective to which they relate the most. Moreover, if a student chances upon an issue they find particularly compelling in the process, it can make learning more enjoyable and give them a lifelong passion or personal challenge to explore independently, which was certainly how I discovered my love for music scholarship, within the broader liberal arts curriculum in which I was instructed. This makes the learning experience more inclusive, and also allows encourages greater breadth in it. In turn, this helps students transcend disciplinary and cultural boundaries, and allows them to participate in developing new ideas, discovering new research paradigms, and engaging in dialogue with individuals from a variety of backgrounds—something that has become increasingly important for scholarship in an interdisciplinary, interconnected, world. Even though I emphasize breadth in the learning experience, I do not think this can happen independently of depth. I believe that students should not just be exposed to a broad spectrum of ideas in the classroom, they should be able to understand these ideas well too, especially if they are technically complex or challenging. This has a wider significance for society. On the one hand, helping students find perspectives to which they can relate teaches them to think for themselves, which is necessary for citizens in a democratic culture—but on the other hand, people cannot really think for themselves if they do not have a firm grasp of the issues at hand, which is particularly hard to achieve in the information-heavy climate of academia and the wider culture of media sound bites we live in today. This is why I encourage depth in the learning experience, which ultimately reflects my belief, as a classically trained musician, in the idea of apprenticeship, that is, the idea that students should learn first by “sitting at the feet of the master,” before speaking with their own voices. I believe students need to learn their trade, by rigorously mastering certain basic musical skills or certain critical ideas from the arts and sciences, before they attempt to ply their own in the outside world.