My teaching is rooted in the traditions I love most: Irish and Old-Time American music.
With every student, I work on the traditional elements that make a tune come alive: ornamentation, phrasing, rhythmic drive, and tone.
My goal is always to help students build the technical foundation to play within whatever tradition calls to them, while also finding their own voice. I keep a focus on the joy and connection to be found in traditional music. At the same time, I never let technique become an end in itself.
I teach students of all ages and all levels, whether they're picking up an instrument for the first time or refining technique they've carried for years.
Lessons are available in person in Santa Cruz, CA, or virtually for students anywhere.
I feel so fortunate to have found Rebecca as a teacher for me and my son. It is rare to encounter someone who is both incredibly skilled as a musician and also gifted as a teacher. She is adaptive with her teaching style: able to excite and challenge my 10 year old son, encouraging his talents in such a way that he looks forward to lessons and is happy to practice his music on his own, and yet also work amazingly with me, an adult learner who needs more processing time and lots of smaller tasks to build up my skills.
Her lessons are a testament to the thought and care she puts into the music learning process and skills are presented in multiple ways until they click. I look forward to the notes we get after each lesson, detailing exercises that build upon each other and the recordings of each tune with different speeds and a variation of ornamentation so that we will have plenty of material to practice with and her beautiful style to emulate.
In just one month of lessons I felt more confident in my own abilities and am so grateful for the access to musical skills her lessons afford to the both of us. Rebecca is one of the best teachers I have had the honor to work with in my life.
- Alli Novak, Student and Mother of a Student
My own relationship with music began over forty years ago, when I started learning through the Suzuki method while simultaneously diving into fiddle music. That dual start shaped how I think about teaching to this day: the Suzuki method instilled in me a deep respect for ear-training, repetition, and deliberate practice, while fiddle music gave me an early, hands-on relationship with the freedom, ornamentation and feel that can't be learned from a method book. That foundation later expanded at the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College, where I developed a more expansive, exploratory relationship with sound and composition. Between those threads I built a teaching approach that's equally at home in a tune session as it is in a discussion of music theory.
Beyond Irish and Old-Time music, my playing and teaching have also been shaped by a deep curiosity of other genres beyond my own. I love nothing more than getting into the weeds with a student about why a tune lifts the way it does, or what a small shift in bow weight or finger placement changes in the sound. These conversations about theory and mechanics aren't a detour from the music, they are where our understanding deepens and our connections to tradition are formed.
But underneath all of it, what I care about most is joy. The greatest reward in teaching is watching a student unlock a technique or a sound they've been chasing, that moment when something clicks, and you can see them light up. Helping students find their own joy in making music, and witnessing that spark take hold, is why I teach.
