Building on that early experience, Edgar spent one year teaching at his alma mater, Elsik High School, and is now entering his fourth year as the percussion instructor at Waltrip High School—where he supplies expertise, mentorship, and enthusiasm to every learner, under the guidance of Mrs. Smith.
Authoring A Drum Captain’s Guide for Future Drumlines and guiding students from shaky first steps to confident performance, Edgar excels in his teaching pedagogy, working equally well with complete beginners and those with prior musical experience.
Alongside teaching, Edgar has built Python-powered tools for advanced music analysis. He maintains the crim-intervals package—enabling harmonic-interval slicing and clustering for the Renaissance Imitation Mass (CRIM) project—and developed a React/Streamlit Intervals Highlighter that visualizes CRIM distributions atop MEI-encoded scores.
Edgar’s work is driven by a single goal: to harness data-informed methods and inclusive pedagogy to empower students—regardless of background—to discover their own musical voices.
Edgar Leon is a composer-coder who graduated from Haverford College in May 2025 with a double major in Computer Science and Music Composition. His senior thesis for string orchestra, The Memory of Things Left Unsaid, was featured in a departmental showcase and workshopped by students from Haverford College and musicians from the Network for New Music (list musicians here).
He has also had some exposure to film scoring with his cues recorded by the Budapest Symphony Orchestra.
In Fall 2025, he’ll begin an M.M. in Composition at Temple University, where he plans to expand his explorations of orchestration and multimedia composition.
Growing up in Alief, an underserved Houston neighborhood, shaped Edgar’s commitment to equitable music education. He arrived at his high school band program with no formal training—learning percussion, bass guitar, and reading clefs from YouTube and MuseScore—and soon found himself mentoring his peers. Under the guidance of Mrs. Smith, his first band director, he held numerous leadership positions such as Front Ensemble Captain & Head Drum Major (2020–2021), Assistant Drum Major & Head Drum Captain (2019–2020), and Vice President & Head Equipment Manager (2018–2019). He also is a QuestBridge National College Match Recipient and was a Superintendent Academically Talented Scholar and POSSE Finalist.
