About Connor Buckley

Hi! I’m a brass teacher in the Delaware County area. I’m a graduate of Marple Newtown High School, and I recently earned my bachelor’s of music education from Millersville University in Lancaster County PA, completing student teaching during the 2020-21 school year both in person and virtually! 

I studied trumpet under Drs. Keith Wiley and Amy Cherry at Millersville, performing with and teaching various ensembles, including 9 semesters in the Millersville Wind Ensemble and 4 with the Millersville Jazz Ensemble. Additionally, I was a drum major and then staff member for the Millersville Marauder Marching Band, under the direction of Dr. Joseph Cernuto. Currently, I am serving as the visual instructor for the Cardinal O’Hara High School Marching Band in Springfield. 

Here at Music & Arts, I specialize in teaching beginner-advanced trumpet, and beginner-intermediate trombone and baritone. I like to focus on a lot of the most fundamental aspects of brass playing through a sound to symbol idea and model. We often view music as notes on a page rather than the sounds we’re producing, and it restricts us in so many ways. Music is a language, and when we learn any other language, we learn to sound to symbol. You likely didn’t learn to read before you spoke your first words, you learned words before you learned how to spell them or even what letters were! In this sense, when we learn music, we can learn to play first without all of notes to read getting in our way. This doesn’t mean that sheet music is useless, but far too often we use it as a crutch when we don’t need it nearly as much as we think.