We are teaching tomorrow's teachers.

This is music that I want them to know about and hear and perform.

I ordered a score of Florence Price's meditation.

It's one of the most beautiful minute and a half long pieces of music I've ever experienced.

I was playing through the piece at my piano and I had this moment of just I couldn't believe that I had gotten this far in a music career and not discovered this music before.

And that's something that I did not want to perpetuate for my students.

I think if you'd ask most non-expert musicians to name some classical composers, they'd probably name white European men.

I love the music of Mendelssohn and Brahms and Beethoven, but that can't be all that we teach.

There's a responsibility there in terms of what message we're sending by asking students to pay attention to some music and not other music.

And so the privileged status of that one particular style of music is something that I think we should work toward dismantling.

I think it's essential that the ways of music making that we foreground in our curriculum represent all of the interests of our students and show that there isn't just one valid way of music making.

Early in my career, I spent a lot of effort thinking about how I teach techniques, methods, assessments, and I now spend much more time thinking about what I teach, who's music, what's the message, implicit or explicit.

And that has really enlivened teaching for me in this really powerful way, because it can be a small but important step toward justice.