Mr. Gray was appointed Full Professor in Clarinet in the UCLA Music Department in 1993 where he also teaches the Woodwind Chamber Ensemble class. He has a Clarinet studio of 12-15 private students each year, and his students perform regularly in the UCLA Philharmonia, UCLA Wind Ensemble, Woodwind Chamber Ensembles, Collaborative Piano Chamber class...plus their individual Junior, Senior and Graduate Recitals.

During the course of his teaching, it often becomes necessary to include career counseling, i.e. suggesting "combination careers" to include teaching, playing, music management, etc., in order to increase the students' options after graduation. The importance of learning all the instruments in the clarinet family is also stressed. For those students interested in studio work, he often takes them to sessions with him so that they can observe first hand what takes place. The strong emphasis on accurate sight reading in such work points out the need for students to be thoroughly versed in scale and chord patterns, to recognize phrase groupings and to practice sight-reading new material non-stop.

In a profile on Gray by Richard Ginell in Windplayer Magazine, Gray comments,

"I see part of my teaching mission as helping expose my students to what is going on in the whole musical world, rather than just what they might be studying on clarinet at that time, and if at all possible, get them off campus to hear the great live music made by local and visiting artists in Los Angeles. I also encourage them to play with groups off campus and to take advantage of Los Angeles for the music center that it is."

As for orchestra auditions, he continues,

"Students of mine who have done well on auditions have usually done many of them in a row. A former student of mine, John Bruce Yeh, now in the Chicago Symphony, won that position after coming close in two prior auditions that same year."