About The Project

As of 2025, I decided to embark on this project of donation based education. Inspired by Master Confucius, who never refused a student and accepted any payment from a bundle of dried meat and up.

Previously the investment for studying with me was about €130 for a full month of lessons. In this country, individual music lessons vary from €35-€50 per lesson in general. Nonetheless, it has always been my ideal to offer lessons at affordable rates based in my beliefs.

Students can now partake in these lessons regardless of their financial situation, they are not obliged to give a specific amount, or any at all if they aren’t able to. This means that the availability and continuity of these lessons also depend on accepting external support from sponsors who wish to contribute. If you wish to support this project, you can make a one-time donation, or choose to sponsor a student with a monthly contribution. See the How to Donate Section below. You may also read about me in the “About” page on this website and get an insight on my teaching through select articles in my Blog.

Your support directly helps sponsor students who are eager to learn but may not be able to afford regular lessons. At the same time, your contribution sustains my ability to continue offering these lessons as my livelihood. The donations go to ensuring for my students a high quality education. This is through the 1-on-1 courses offered exclusively. I offer a Music Appreciation course for amateur musicians which is supported solely by the participating students themselves and not by external donations. I also offer Entrance exam preparation and Practice Help courses for a set but affordable fee, separate from this donation based project.

My students come from all over but the vast majority come from The Netherlands, The United States of America, and Costa Rica, my main areas of operations in the past.

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Why This Education

I offer courses that are individual, tailored to the student’s needs, high quality, holistic, relevant, and personal. Arts education must be personal. These courses require a fair amount of work and effort on part of the students, but are nonetheless doable in conjunction with other training. These courses offer a valuable addition to a student’s experience in traditional music schools or in conservatory style institutions. In these institutions, group classes are the norm and with the exception of the main instrument specialization, most classes are disregarded as unimportant or treated with apathy by many students. Conservatory courses in “Music Theory” and History are notorious for wasting the precious time of capable and ambitious students and by the time they graduate very few of them can answer even basic questions regarding Harmony, Form, or History. An academic approach to Ethics is also unheard of, and there is rarely a humanistic angle to the student’s development. Too many conservatory students do not even listen to music, are broadly accepting of any recording or performance, and lack critical thinking. How then, can someone then be expected to go on stage and perform a masterpiece of genius of which they know nothing about and understand only in a musically and personally superficial level? No wonder anxiety, frustration, and unhealthy habits plague conservatories all over the world.

My approach starts taking into account the goals, ability, and potential of a student. From there we focus on both practical music matters and holistic building of the student’s path. This is mainly done through extra musical work that includes reading, memorizing poetry, and conversations about art, philosophy, ethics, and more.

It’s important to remember: music is an art of the ear! Not an art of the fingers nor other body part. This is easy to forget as there is indeed a technical barrier to be climbed in every instrument in order to effectively communicate through music. Nonetheless, music is played with the ear. By this I mean the mind’s ear, and this is what my courses in aim to also develop.

As musicians, performers, and teachers, it is our duty to understand what a piece is about in order to communicate it effectively to the audience. This is performance in its essence, like an essay titled “my understanding of what this piece is about”. Precisely because of this, since we are dealing with some of the greatest minds in the history of humanity, it is also our duty to build ourselves through serious education to ask the great masters of music the right questions and further our understanding of the masterpieces we are in charge of performing. We have great responsibility in our hands… The great masters of the past depend on us.

My courses are tailored to each student. Whether for auditions, concerts, or to complement the usual gaps in traditional conservatory training. Understanding of harmony and form in particular are essential for the serious musician. The performer who has little to no knowledge of these topics risks being just a puppet, an orchestral slave dependent on someone else’s ideas about music to be able to create something worthwhile.

My lessons generally include discussions on musical material to be worked on, including ear training, dictations, lectures, debates, and more. I also provide important historical context and include topics and work in fields that support the overall education of the student. This includes conversations about Ethics, Literature, Art, and poetry! I entice all my students to learn poetry by memory as I have found it to be an extremely important educational practice. My Professor, Vladislav Soyfer, to whom I am indebted to for the education he gave me, had me do the same, for which I am very grateful. Also following his example, all my lessons end with a joint listening session of a world class recording of a masterpiece that we also discuss.

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Reference of Donations (for Sponsors)

• €20 → Helps to support one class for a student. This covers approximately 60% of the total when looking at average market value for 1-on-1 lessons. It includes a 60 minute lesson and reviewing of the homework assigned. I only give the lessons when I can ensure some continuity for a particular student. Less lessons than my standard 6 per cycle is just not enough to even scratch the surface of our task at hand.

• €120 → Helps to support a 6 lesson cycle for a student. This covers approximately 60% of the total when looking at average market value for 1-on-1 lessons. This is the minimum amount of lessons I offer to students. It can be one lesson per week or two lessons per week depending on student’s ability and availability. Continuity allows the students to get further acquainted with some of the material as well getting used to the required time commitment and effort they must make. For the more practical applications, this amount of time provides clear results for the students. For the less practical matters, it has a “seed planting” effect. Time and work will enable the concepts learnt to flourish.

• €500 → Fully sponsors a student for regular lessons for a period of about 4 months. This is the minimum time period for some of the more advanced concepts to be grasped by the student as well as for the student to get accustomed to the intensity of the work at hand. The total course load however, including Solfege, Harmony, and Form is expected to take approximately 2 years for a student with previous formal training and knowledge of music. For how long and for which subjects a student studies with me is highly personalized depending on previous education and goals.

• Custom Amount → Every bit helps, and is greatly appreciated.

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  How to Donate:

  Coming soon…
  In the meantime, you may contact me for details via the Request Info button at the top of this site.
  
  I am in the process of setting up a foundation that will help me to better manage the donations received and will help provide transparency and accountability for everyone who has supported this project. At the moment, I must keep track and include VAT tax on all donations as they count as taxable income for my company. Donations to this project are also not tax deductible for supporters yet. There is a clear difference made in the invoices issued as to what is a normal business transaction for a specific course outside of the donation-based project and all voluntary contributions from both students and supporters that go exclusively towards the donation-based music education project.

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