Dan has taught a range of subjects at Princeton, where he is a professor of music composition. He works with graduate students in Princeton’s renowned composition program on their creative and academic work through seminars on various topics, composition mentoring, and dissertation advising, and has served as Director of the Princeton Sound Kitchen concert series, the primary venue for composers in the department to workshop and share their work. He also taught the year-long undergraduate 16th- and 18th-century counterpoint sequence for over a decade, along with courses focusing in rhythm, songwriting, and more.
Dan co-founded the Princeton Laptop Orchestra (PLOrk) in 2005 with Princeton Computer Science professor Perry Cook, which has served as a model for rethinking how to teach music technology over the last 15 years (pictures below). He also founded the Making Tunes course and concert series, focusing on teaching creative traditional music making with illustrious guests from around the world (some shown below).
More recently, Dan created (in collaboration with Aatish Bhatia) a new online course — Reinventing the Piano — that has become part of a Princeton course called Musical Instruments, Sound, Perception, and Creativity. This lab course brings together a wide range of subjects: music theory, acoustics, instrument design and embodiment, sound perception and cognition, physics-based software modeling of musical instruments, among others, with representative musical repertoire, and fills the university’s Science-Engineering-with-Lab (SEL) distribution requirement.
