Meet the Teacher
Julia Craft is a music educator, pianist, and composer from Southern California, exploring the crossover between the idiomatic practices of acoustic and digital musical language. She began writing music at age 14, using a 10 year old computer and a digital audio workstation. Her music is inspired by jazz fusion, microtonal-electronic music, post-structuralist philosophy, video-game soundtracks, and American minimalism.
She received her B.M. in Music Composition from California State University, Fullerton (CSUF), and is currently pursuing her M.M. from the same institution. There, she studied composition with CSUF Director of Composition Ken Walicki, director of the CSUF New Music Ensemble Eric Dries, and National Endowment for the Arts recipient Pamela Madsen. She has also studied piano with Grammy Award-winning pianist & composer Bill Cunliffe.
Julia has performed in a variety of venues, from local coffee shops like The Night Owl here in Fullerton, to the world renowned Carnegie Hall in New York. She has performed with internationally recognized ensembles such as Brightwork New Music, HEX Ensemble, and the Grammy Award-winning Sō Percussion.
She has composed the soundtrack for multiple video games, with an emphasis on electronic and digital sound design. Outside of music, she has been creating her own game, a 2D ARPG titled Enodia, which has been in development since 2018. She also enjoys reading philosophy, and obsessively scouring the internet for a slightly better chocolate chip cookie recipe.
My Teaching Philosophy
As a teacher, it's important to me that my students learn how to be more than just passive consumers of music. For many people, music is just a product to be bought, sold, and discarded when the next hit song releases. Performance and interpretation allows students to get closer to making music their own, but I felt it was still a step removed — at the end of the day, you're still reworking something someone else made. This is why I developed my Integrated Creativity piano program: it's intended to place creation into the foreground, and give students the experience of being creators of art. Not purely as a product to be sold, but for the experience of creation itself. This experience gives us an entirely different perspective on music and how we relate to it. It's also why I offer dedicated composition lessons, so students who are dedicated to the creation of music can receive guidance, writing technique, and performance advising.
