Thomas Garcia wants to be remembered as “a good professor, a good musician, a good colleague.”
Garcia, professor of ethnomusicology (the study of non-Western music cultures) at Miami University, hopes to expand his students' knowledge of the world through music.
Garcia was born in Brazil and came to the U.S. with his parents as a child. His mother was a concert pianist in Brazil, and his father was a professor of Brazilian literature. Garcia said he feels his career is a mix of his parents' careers.
“I kind of combined both things,” Garcia said. “I’m a musician who specializes in Brazilian music, and I write about Brazilian music.”
Garcia didn’t always plan on becoming a musician. In fact, he said his mother discouraged it.
“All my life I heard ‘You can do anything you want except be a musician,’” Garcia said. “She knew it was a hard life.”
So, he started his college career at Northwestern University as a pre-med student and studied music at the same time.
He quickly found neither of those majors suited him there.
“I was injured in my first year at Northwestern and spent a lot of time in hospitals,” Garcia said, “and decided I had an allergy that precluded me from being a medical doctor, and that was that, I hated hospitals.”
Garcia then applied to The Juilliard School, where he was the only candidate accepted out of 65 others. There, in New York City, he went on to earn his first bachelor’s and master’s degrees in guitar performance. Ten years later, Garcia decided to leave New York because he no longer wanted to be in the music industry.
He went on to study at the University of Massachusetts where he earned his master’s degree in musicology, and at Duke University where he received a doctorate in historical performance with an emphasis in ethnomusicology. However, Garcia did not find his true passion until he became a professor at Miami.
“What keeps me going is the small number of students who are really dedicated,” Garcia said. “I’m passionate about what I do and how I do it. My aim is to instill that passion in students … to change the way they think about music and think about life so they have a greater appreciation of how the world is connected.”
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Blake Villers, a senior public administration major, said his first impression of Garcia was a good one. He’s had Garcia as a professor for the past three semesters for The History of Rock and Roll (MUS 225), Rock in the 1960s (MUS 415), and currently for Brazilian Music and Film (MUS 204).
“He’s the best professor I’ve had at Miami,” Villers said. “I think we have some of the best professors, probably in the country. I’ve never had a bad experience with one, but he is above everybody.”
Sid Steketee, a sophomore biology major, said Garcia is different from most of her other professors because he is humble about his talents.
“I really just love watching him play the guitar because it is so mesmerizing,” Steketee said. “He is so above and beyond talented at it. Whereas other professors give a lecture and it’s like, ‘look, I’m so smart,’ which is great because they are … but you know what I mean? It’s different.”
Student reactions to his performances like Steketee’s are the reason Garcia performs.
He puts performances on for his students and said those are his proudest accomplishments.
“Students walk away from those live events going, ‘wow.’ It’s got something they’ve never heard, something they are not familiar with,” Garcia said. “And the idea is to get them to not just listen to music they are familiar with but to start thinking about music in different ways.”
Above all, both Steketee and Villers agreed that what makes Garcia unique is the way he connects with his students.
“He cares about his students,” Villers said. “He makes active efforts to know students personally and make connections with everybody.”
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