Teaching

How he teaches

From the top down. Most players learn the notes and then try to make them make sense. Lawson works the other way: start with what the piece is about, what story it tells, how it should make a listener feel, and what shape it has — draw the arc on a piece of paper — and only then work inward to every note, every dynamic, every marking. A performer who knows the shape of a piece can recover from anything on stage. The same method reverses the calendar: time one representative passage, budget the whole piece from it, and schedule yourself to be performance-ready a week early. "Hope is not a strategy," as he puts it, borrowing a line from motorcycle riding; preparation should produce predictably successful results.

Percussionists are sound designers. Choosing a sound — the instrument, vintage or modern, acoustic or sampled or built by hand; the implement; the tuning; the muffling; the amplification — is part of the performance, an opportunity and a responsibility. "Make a choice about every sound you make."

The same method in the control room. A mix begins with what the song is about and what it should make someone feel, not with the kick drum; a record is reverse-engineered from its release date; and an engineer, like a percussionist, is a sound designer, responsible for every sound that reaches the listener. Lawson teaches production, engineering, and songwriting the way he teaches percussion: top down, deadline first, details last.

What he holds himself to. From the Xueji, the "Record of Learning" in the Confucian Book of Rites, one of the oldest treatises on teaching anywhere in the world:

Guide, but do not drag. Strengthen, but do not suppress. Open the way, but do not walk it for them.

Guiding without dragging produces harmony; strengthening without suppressing makes the work feel possible; opening the way without finishing it makes the student think. "This is what I hold myself to as your teacher."

Teaching and mentoring experience

Belmont University, School of Music — Nashville, TN

Adjunct Instructor of Percussion, Fall 2026–present

Applied Classical Percussion. Weekly private lessons for a studio of seventeen students drawn from the commercial music, audio engineering technology, music business, and composition programs. The studio is built on snare drum, marimba, and timpani — the instruments that teach rhythmic precision, harmony and voice leading, and ear training and touch, and the ones a working drummer is asked to play on a session — with four-mallet vibraphone for non-majors and drum set for commercial students. Assignments pair the standard pedagogical repertoire (Stone, Cirone, Wilcoxon, Hochrainer) with great music by great composers (Cage, Reich, Xenakis, Bartók, and Bach in transcription) and the songs students' families will ask them to play, each with a harmonic analysis. Students keep a digital lesson notebook, record themselves weekly, follow a technique program with an individualized practice-routine assignment, and play juries.

Instrumental Seminar: Classical Percussion (MSM 2051). Weekly seminar for commercial percussion majors, designed from scratch in 2026: student performances with masterclass feedback, alternating with lectures drawn from a 32-topic catalog. Fall 2026 lectures include How to Spend Your Time at College; the six-part Preparation Lecture (preparing a piece of music, choosing sounds, practice strategies, hitting your deadline, the bulletproof performer); and The Percussion Music of Steve Reich, ending in a class performance of Clapping Music. Every student performs on at least two instruments, one of them a keyboard instrument.

Belmont Faculty Percussion Quartet. With Christopher Norton, Todd London, and Christine Comer; Alejandro Viñao's Water, November 23, 2026.

The Living Array (Frist Art Museum, September 25, 2026). Composed and directed a new work for the opening of Shimmer: Dreaming the Posthuman, performed by the Belmont percussion studio ensemble and faculty dispersed through the audience — "a sound system built entirely of people."

The Parlor — Music Row, Nashville, TN

Partner and Studio Manager; founder and director of the internship and training program, 2022–present

Recording Studio Internship. A for-credit internship and training program for university students, with interns from Belmont, Yale, Brown, Middle Tennessee State, and Florida State. Interns learn signal flow, session preparation, and the assistant engineer's etiquette on working Music Row sessions, alongside professional producers, engineers, and artists.

Private studio — Nashville, TN

Production, engineering, and songwriting

Private instruction. One-on-one lessons and mentoring for producers, engineers, songwriters, and artists, taught privately alongside his own studio work: the same top-down method, applied to a mix, a session, and a song.

Sō Percussion — Brooklyn, NY

Member, 2003–2007

Masterclasses and residencies. With the quartet, masterclasses at The Juilliard School, the Yale School of Music, Princeton University, Peabody Conservatory, Northwestern University, and many other schools.

Yale University — New Haven, CT

Graduate Teaching Fellow, 2001–2003

Practical Applications in Music; Multimedia Art and Technology I and II.

What students play

Three commitments in the percussion studio. Every applied student's assignments draw on three bodies of music:

1. The standard percussion pedagogical repertoire the profession assumes:

   • the method books — for snare drum, Stone, Cirone, Wilcoxon, and Delécluse; for timpani, Hochrainer, Goodman, Peters, and Firth; for keyboard percussion, Whaley, Goldenberg, and Leigh Howard Stevens;

   • and the solo pieces every percussionist is expected to know — for keyboard percussion, Keiko Abe, Ney Rosauro, Gary Burton, and David Friedman; for timpani, John Beck, John Bergamo, William Cahn, and Elliott Carter.

2. Great music by great composers for the instrument — Varèse, Bartók, Cage, Carter, Stockhausen, Feldman, Berio, Xenakis, Reich, Rzewski, Globokar, Ferneyhough, Nørgård, Schwantner, James Wood, David Lang, Michael Gordon, Julia Wolfe, Viñao, and Andy Akiho — and transcriptions of Bach, Satie, and Bartók.

3. The music their family is going to ask them to play — Beatles songs, standards, hymns, holiday music, each with a harmonic analysis — so that "Play us something!" never again goes unanswered.

Chamber music. Percussion is an ensemble instrument, and Lawson spent his twenties inside this music, in Sō Percussion and Alarm Will Sound. In the seminar and the percussion ensemble, students learn the chamber repertoire of the last hundred years — the pieces every percussionist is expected to know, many of which he has performed or recorded. The percussion-ensemble core: Varèse's Ionisation, Cage and Harrison's Double Music, Chávez's Toccata, Cage's Third Construction, Reich's Drumming, Clapping Music, and Music for Pieces of Wood, Riley's In C, Andriessen's Workers Union, David Lang's the so-called laws of nature, and Paul Lansky's Threads. The mixed-ensemble core: Bartók's Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, Crumb's Music for a Summer Evening, Berio's Linea, and Stravinsky's L'Histoire du soldat. And the living edge of the repertoire, the commissions in the books of Sō Percussion, Third Coast Percussion, and Sandbox Percussion — Steven Mackey, Dan Trueman, Bryce Dessner, Caroline Shaw, Glenn Kotche, Philip Glass, Danny Elfman, Devonté Hynes, Jlin, Augusta Read Thomas, and Andy Akiho. Seminar students play this music together: Clapping Music this fall, with Music for Pieces of Wood, In C, Workers Union, and Cartridge Music on the list.

Masterclasses, clinics, and lectures

Lawson maintains a working catalog of thirty-two masterclasses for universities, conservatories, festivals, and conferences, programmable for audiences from first-year commercial-music majors to graduate percussionists and professionals, singly or as multi-session units. A selection:

• Musicianship and preparation — How to Prepare a Piece of Music With Predictably Successful Results · Practice Strategies: How to Practice So the Hours Count · The Bulletproof Performer · Singing: The Secret Weapon · Memorization · Phrasing · Polyrhythms and Metric Modulation · The Theater of Performance · Cueing in a Conductorless Chamber Ensemble

• Repertoire — The Percussion Music of Steve Reich · The Percussion Music of John Cage · The Percussion Music of Iannis Xenakis · Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Music and Percussion Surveys · Rhythmic Techniques from the Repertoire

• Instrument intensives — Snare Drum · Marimba · Vibraphone · Timpani · Orchestral Percussion · Hand Drums, Accessories, and World Percussion · Building a Multiple-Percussion Setup · Drum Set ↔ Percussion

• The profession — How to Play in an Orchestra · Orchestral Audition Preparation · Broadway: How to Prepare For, Sub On, and Play a Show · The Percussionist in the Studio · Recording Sessions, from Film Score to Nashville Songs and the Number System · Drum Programming, Finger Drumming, Controllers, and Electronics · Designing a Portfolio Career · How to Spend Your Time at College

With Sō Percussion he gave masterclasses at The Juilliard School, the Yale School of Music, Princeton University, Peabody Conservatory, Northwestern University, and many other schools. He is available for masterclasses, clinics, residencies, and conference presentations.

For producers, engineers, and songwriters: the catalog's studio sessions — The Percussionist in the Studio; Recording Sessions, from Film Score to Nashville Songs and the Number System; Drum Programming, Finger Drumming, Controllers, and Electronics — and the training program he wrote for The Parlor's interns.

Teaching materials

Several of the documents Lawson writes for his students are public. They are the clearest picture of how the studio runs.

• Applied Percussion — How I Teach This Course — the why behind the applied studio: the three instruments, the three commitments, practice, communication, and hearing protection

• Preparation Lecture — how to prepare a piece of music with predictably successful results; choosing sounds; practice strategies; hitting your deadline; the bulletproof performer; how to spend your time at college

• Masterclasses, Clinics & Lectures: A Working Catalog — all thirty-two topics, with combined teaching units, a seminar repertoire list, and an audience guide

• Recommended Listening, Reading, and Watching — "Your output will reflect your input. Choose intentionally. Consume a lot."

Study, host, or collaborate

For masterclasses, clinics, residencies, conference presentations, or private study — in percussion, production, engineering, or songwriting: lawson@lawsonwhite.com · 347.581.9315