Tom currently teaches private cello lessons and cello sectional classes for local schools in Tampa, Florida. In his private lessons, students learn the foundations of cello technique and the standard classical repertoire, but something that is also important to Tom is allowing (and helping) his students to explore styles of music other than classical that they may have an interest in. This attitude is a natural extension of Tom's interest in jazz, rock, world music, avant-garde, improvisation, and other styles not traditionally associated with the cello.

Other than the specific notes and rhythms of pieces of music, what must one learn as a cellist? How to sit with the cello, how to move one's body effortlessly in order to freely channel one's inner musical conception, how to think about and feel music, and also how NOT to think about music. While "proper" technique is quite important for the cellist, what is even more important is the internalization of music, feeling music as movements of the spirit.

If there is no clear musical conception inside the mind of the musician, there is no way to present a clear musical experience to the listener. But we must be careful not to make this conception purely intellectual. Indeed, the purest and most moving musical expression is spontaneous, of the moment, and unhindered by intellectual abstractions of the mind. In this state, the musical experience may be as surprising and exciting to the musician as it is to the listener. This is the state the musician wants to reach, that state of pure expression which is unhindered by physical and mental effort. To do this, the musician must become so physically intimate with his instrument that whatever sound he hears in his head is automatically created by his body with his instrument. This is the state Tom aspires to himself, and this is the ideal he instills in his students.

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