Norman S.

Yes, I'm a playwright and a professional stage director and a movie editor, which means I spend LOTS of time alone. I'm also a performing actor and musician and, at times, have LOTS of interaction with the public. I LOVE to teach. I've been on hiatus for a year or so and am announcing a new studio for drama-coaching, music lessons, and other small format teaching right here in Houston.

I started teaching music professionally in 1973. I may be best known for my grasp of music theory and my functional attention to muscle movement for beginner music training. I feel I've helped to change the way the world understands how the body works to optimize performance. Sometimes more famous than me, my students have included folks who are rock guitar icons, music professionals with number one hits, students who have graced the front and back pages of national newspapers, the influential, the well-known, those who could well afford any teacher they wanted. I feel honored to have been entrusted with their children and their talents and their confidences and, at times, autistic, aspergers and savant students as well as thousands and thousands of regular folks of all ages who have wanted to enrich their lives with music, drama, or writing, thought they were incapable of musical/artistic expression, were in a musical rut, had not had lessons for decades and thought it might be too late, or needed teaching through the beginner and intermediate levels to specialized expert level instruction.

I began playing classical guitar in Germany when I was 5. My first professional performance was when I was 13. I am a composer and playwright, a publisher and a poet of some renown under my own name and various pseudonyms. My book of guitar pedagogy, "Toward a Mastery" will be available in the near future. I teach the arts, teach theater, having done my graduate work at The University of Houston, and writing, having also attended Washington University in St. Louis, Webster College, HB Studios in NY, as well as music theory, performance, composition, arranging and songwriting. I founded an institution dedicated to learning by doing c.1990 which now has shifted its institutional focus from music to movie production.