Ethan Heyenga
has spent most of his life making music, since he first touched his family's upright piano at the age of four. Growing up as an only child with two dogs and an endless parade of cats for company, he would amuse himself for long periods of time by improvising scores to imagined films or listening to his parents' CD collection, where Bach and Beethoven bumped elbows with the Beatles, Ray Charles, Bob Dylan and Miles Davis.
He often tricked his first piano teacher into playing a piece for him once to demonstrate, listening and learning by ear- he didn't like reading music, and found it easier to learn that way. He would also change notes in pieces he knew, wondering what it would sound like if it were done differently. In middle school, he picked up the saxophone, discovered jazz, and found a new outlet for the creative impulse in improvisation.
A teenage love affair with jazz led to Berklee College of Music and six years spent in Boston, rehearsing and gigging with brilliant musicians and teachers, studying jazz and Celtic music and beginning to write and produce songs. Since leaving Boston in 2017, Ethan has finished five EPs of his own and helped his students record and release a combined three EPs, plus ten or so singles.
Ethan believes that improvisation and composition are essentials for all musicians- analogous to speaking and writing for natural languages. A system of education that fails to develop those capacities in musicians is almost worthless- the same as teaching children to do nothing but recite essays and poems. If the idea is to set someone up for a musical life, they need to be able to follow their ears and express their own ideas.
With that in mind, Ethan aims to help each student develop a project-based practice that includes all four arts of music- improvisation, composition, arranging and performance/interpretation- and the "fifth art," listening. The idea is for each student to become a creative, thoughtful and self-sufficient musician who can fold music into their life and their life into their music- a defender of humanity- and to smile and laugh the whole way through.
INSTRUMENTS.
Guitar, Saxophone, Piano, Songwriting and Voice
STYLES.
Jazz, rock, pop, folk, classical (piano), the various "indie" styles
REQUIREMENTS.
Students ages 6 and up
CONNECT.