About Me
I started playing around with the piano when I was only three because….. well because my mom was a piano teacher and my dad was a piano tuner, so playing piano was kind of like breathing at our house.
When I was twelve I figured out that I really liked playing with others, so I started playing for my school choirs.
At 16 I started teaching other people how to play the piano when I took on my mom’s overflow of piano students.
At 18 I went off to college to study piano. I got a bachelor’s degree in piano performance from the College of Wooster in Ohio.
Then I married Mr. Wonderful, had three children, got my Master’s Degree from Michigan State University in chamber music and accompanying, and moved multiple times, finally ending up in Metro Atlanta, GA in 1989.
I have served as staff accompanist at Truman State University, and as freelance accompanist at The University of Indianapolis and The University of Georgia.
I created a fine arts school for homeschooled students while our children were young and served as Executive Director for 20 years
In 2012, after raising our family, I returned to my first love of playing with others and became a full-time collaborative pianist, which just means that I don’t work for a living, I play!
I am currently the choral and vocal staff accompanist at the University of North Georgia, as well as a freelance vocal and choral accompanist in the greater metro Atlanta area.
About Piano Collaborations
I am a vocal and choral accompanist, therefore everything on this site is directed specifically towards vocal and choral collaborators.
I am not a voice teacher, but I have worked in many, many voice studios over the last 50 year, which gives me a unique vantage point from which to approach my collaborative work.
At the university, I have worked with most of the vocal faculty for over a decade now and know how they teach, things they would try with their students, technics that they want to reinforce and questions they will ask. Because of our long standing relationships, these voice teachers actually ask for my input on things I’m seeing or hearing in the lessons.
I never usurp the authority of the voice teacher and I definitely defer to their superior knowledge of voice training. However, if a student is not completely understanding what the teacher is saying, I am free to try something different in coaching to see if it clears up the problem. I ALWAYS communicate what we are doing with the teacher so there is never an issue with who is doing what.
I believe that being a collaborative pianist means more than playing for someone in their lessons and coaching with them one on one during the week to prepare for a recital. I take the full dictionary definition of collaborating quite literally : To work together with another toward a common goal, especially in an intellectual endeavor.
I believe that my job as an accompanist is to collaborate with the teachers AND the students to reach a common goal…creating a well taught, prepared, whole, professional musician by the time of graduation.
Over the last few years especially, I have begun to develop my own system for working with the students and the teachers. During this same time span, I have noticed a lot of things that have annoyed my teachers. I have noted issues that the students are starting college with. I have agonized with the teachers about how ill-prepared students are for their lessons. I have tried to work to build body awareness in the students. We have brain stormed better ways to get students to practice. All in all it has been more of a hit and miss thing with both the teachers and myself trying to understand and remedy the problems.
It wasn’t until this past year that I started to get a glimmer of what might actually work – I would take up the things that are keeping the teachers from being able to do the things that only they can do. I would work on the things that keep the students from being the best musicians that they can possibly be.
Now this puts me in a whole different realm of collaborative work, so if this is not the sort of thing you are interested in, I completely understand. But for me it’s all about moving students through fundamentals, musicianship and artistry, which you will see in many of my writings.
You may wonder as you read my posts, “ Why in the world is she concerned about that? I don’t have time to do the basics, how can I squeeze all of this in as well?” Once again, I am in a unique position as I am in a smaller university with a very tight knit music department. We ALL care about how the students are doing both in and out of class. We ALL spend a lot of one on one time with the students and try to help them become functioning adults as well as outstanding musicians. So for me, spending as much time as I need to spend with the students is of the utmost importance.
Hopefully you will find a thing or two here that you might be able to apply to your work as well. Just know that much of what I am blogging about is in its infancy as far as seeing how it works in the larger vocal studio. I will amend where necessary and definitely give you a heads up if this is something I am just planning to try, but haven’t gotten any data on as of yet.
Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions or if you would like a further explanation. I hope you enjoy this new perspective, and thanks for reading!