What is Rose Garden Songwriting?
Rose Garden Songwriting is an independent music studio offering one-of-a-kind online lessons, including songwriting, voice, piano, guitar, ukulele, production, and the creative process. Lessons are tailored to each student's strengths, needs, values, and goals.
Creativity, self-reflection, and independent thinking are encouraged!
Why a Rose Garden?
New York City has a surprising number of roses. My grandparents, Nuyoricans from the Cloisters and the Bronx, have kept a rose garden for as long as I've been alive. I enjoyed Brooklyn's bountiful gardens when I had breaks on sunny days between student lessons. I felt struck by the similarities between investing time and support in a student, the creative process and the climbing vines of flowers blooming.
As a student of music, I noticed outdated teaching models that did not serve students and actually hindered learning and creating. I resolved to be a positive light within the educational field, to teach with compassion and healthy boundaries, and to cultivate safe spaces for experiential learning, freedom of choice, self-expression, musical exploration, and honoring students' inner compass and natural talents.
I created Rose Garden Songwriting as a platform and container for private lessons and workshops for the new and innovative ideas I've learned about music education, the creative process and how it relates to neuroscience, nervous system regulation, somatic practices and honoring the inner authority of all.
My ultimate intention for Rose Garden Songwriting is to help build a creative world that values abundance, encouragement, compassion, and personal integrity.
A world that sees the inherent value in every experience, every person, and everything.
A world that practices cultivating flow states, trusting our inner authority, sensing energy, being with paradox, differentiation, choosing discernment over judgment, process over product, and the idea that the quality of our attention can create something greater than ourselves.
Hi! Iām Grace
If you'd like to write a song, I can help. I've taught hundreds of students over the past 17 years in person in Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Dallas and online lessons to students in NYC, San Francisco, Seattle, Houston, and Florida.
A graduate of the acclaimed jazz program at the University of North Texas, I studied under the late Paris Rutherford and talented vocalist Rosana Eckert. I continued my vocal studies with Kim Chandler. This rigorous musical education, mixed with my teaching experience and personal interest in the creative process, Feldenkrais, flow states, neuroscience, play, and experiential learning, is woven throughout my approach.
One of my fundamental beliefs is that value is intrinsic and inherent. I believe this for everyone, especially my students. It does not matter your skill level or merits; you are valuable, worthy, and enough exactly as you are.
My lessons are intuitive and compassionately explore students' organic curiosities, natural strengths and gently expand beyond their musical comfort zones.
I work with songwriters of all ages and skills, from beginner writers to experienced individuals who need help overcoming writer's block or developing a more holistic approach to their creative output.
Self-taught and a natural reverse engineer, my knowledge, combined with somatics, neuroscience, and thoughtful reflection on my lived experience, allows me to make interesting suggestions and insights into the creative process.