Speaker Biographies

MARVIN BLICKENSTAFF is known among piano teachers throughout North America for his teaching, lecturing, and performing. As a faculty member of International Workshops for eleven years, Professor Blickenstaff lectured and performed in Canada and Europe. With Louise Bianchi and Lynn Freeman Olson, he co-authored a thirty-six-book series for beginning piano students entitled Music Pathways. Blickenstaff has served on the editorial board of the American Music Teacher and as an Associate Editor of Keyboard Companion. He is past president of the Board of Trustees of the Frances Clark Center for Keyboard Pedagogy and serves on the Executive Planning Committee for the National Conference on Keyboard Pedagogy. Blickenstaff’s teaching career is associated with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he taught for nine years, and with Goshen College, Indiana, where he taught for over 20 years. He now resides in the greater Philadelphia area and teaches at The New School for Music Study in Princeton and in his home studio. In 2007 the on -line journal Piano Pedagogy Forum published tributes to Blickenstaff honoring his contribution to piano teaching in America. In that same year he was named Fellow of the Royal Conservatory of Music at Toronto. In 2009, the Music Teachers National Association selected him for their highest honor, the Achievement Award, and the National Conference on Keyboard Pedagogy honored him with their Lifetime Achievement Award in 2013. (Monday, September 26, 2016: “Mendelssohn’s Songs without words”)

PATRICK GANNON, PhD, is a clinical and performance psychologist practicing in San Francisco and nationally via Skype. A native of New York, Dr. Gannon studied guitar and performed at local recitals throughout his childhood. Dr. Gannon received his undergraduate training at Boston College where he was a member of the varsity tennis team and following graduation began his professional coaching career in tennis. He completed his graduate studies at the California School of Professional Psychology (CSPP) in Berkeley where he earned a master’s and doctorate in clinical psychology.

While at CSPP, he was awarded a training grant from the National Institute of Alcoholism and Alcohol Abuse and co-wrote and directed a video training program on alcoholism and family therapy that won an award at the American Film Festival. Dr. Gannon’s research focused on traumatic anxiety and the effect on affect and identification choice in film viewers. This research inaugurated his career-long interest in the treatment of anxiety, trauma and performance anxiety. In 1989, he published Soul Survivors: A New Beginning For Adults Abused As Children (Prentice Hall), which became the theoretical model for the ASCA Self Help program for adult survivors of child abuse.

Dr. Gannon is a member of the Performing Arts Medicine Association where he presents his research at conferences on the etiology and treatment of performance anxiety and brain-based peak performance training. In 2016, he participated in writing the guidelines for psychological health for the National Association of Schools of Music (in press). He has written articles for the International Musician, most recently, “Don’t Call It Stage Fright: New Thinking About Music Performance Anxiety” and “The Neuroscience of Peak Performance and Flow.” His clients include Olympic level skaters, student and professional musicians, public speakers, test takers, storytellers, brain surgeons, law enforcement and military personnel. He lives in San Rafael, California, with his wife, two boys, his dog Max, and his cat Bella. Dr. Gannon’s website is www.PeakPerformance101.com. (Monday, October 24, 2016: “Musicians are Athletes too, Lessons from Sports Psychology”)

SYLVIA PARKER is Senior Lecturer of Music at the University of Vermont, where she teaches piano and music theory. She performs frequently as piano soloist and ensemble player in Vermont, nationally and internationally. Her CD entitled “Béla Bartók: Peasant Jewels” is published by Centaur Records (2014) and includes his complete piano settings of authentic peasant melodies. She has become interested in Bartók’s work over many years through a long process of performing and studying. Coincidentally, she happens to live just up the road from the house where he spent a summer in Vermont, which heightened her interest even more. She has published journal articles about Bartók including “Béla Bartók’s Other Microcosmos” in MTNA e-Journal (2014), “A Riverton Retreat: Royal Charter to State Forest” in Vermont History (2010), “Béla Bartók’s Arab Music Research and Composition” in Studia Musicologica (2008), and “Bartók at the Crossroads: A Classical Sonatina from Five Rumanian Folk Dances” in College Music Symposium (2003). Her NEPTA session includes photos, stories, docu- ments, field recordings, historic recordings of Bartók playing and talking, and live per- formance of selections from works such as For Children, Sonatina, and Rumanian Folk Dances. (Monday, February 27, 2017: “Bela Bartok: Setting Jewels”)

LISA PARKER has taught at Longy School of Music of Bard College for 38 years, serving as head of the Dalcroze Department, which she started and built into one of the three leading training centers in the USA. She is director of the Longy Dalcroze Summer Institute, which draws students from around the whole world. In 2015 she received the Nadia Boulanger award for excellence in teaching. She has given many teacher training workshops in Dalcroze education throughout the world, most recently in Beijing, Toronto, Denver, and Seattle, and continues to teach workshops, Skype lessons, and private lessons as well as classes in Eurhythmics for seniors. The primary aim of the classes for seniors is to provide a community for elders and to maintain fitness in both body and mind, through work on coordination, memory, and listening skills in an atmosphere of spontaneity and pleasure, the hallmarks of Dalcroze education.

Lisa is a graduate of Smith College, where she majored in music, first heard of Dalcroze, and embarked on a career of helping people find and foster a creative musical spirit. She received her MM at New England Conservatory of Music in orchestral conducting. She earned her Dalcroze License in New York and the Diplôme Supérieur from the Institut Jaques-Dalcroze in Geneva, Switzerland.

Lisa taught for twelve years at NEC and has started many programs in Dalcroze musical education at area music schools. For three years she was one of the guest teachers at the Abreu Fellows program at NEC, sharing Dalcroze techniques with future leaders of El Sistema programs.

She is vitally interested in the application of Dalcroze ideas of movement and improvisation to the private lesson. As active listening is at the base of all meaningful music education, Lisa is interested in all ages and all levels of students, helping them to go within themselves musically so that they grow in confidence and maturity. (Monday, March 27, 2017: “Alternatives to Drill in Solving Musical Problems”)

Pianist GREGG PAULEY has been praised by critics for having “perfect dynamic nuances,” being “at all times technically brilliant,” (The Newark Star Ledger) and for “playing with a maturity that belied his age” (The Portland Press Herald).

A native of Southern California, Mr. Pauley earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of Southern California. He also holds a Master’s degree from Mason Gross School for the Arts at Rutgers University, where he studied with Ilana Vered. Mr. Pauley has performed at Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center and Weill Hall at Carnegie Hall, among many others, and has performed live on radio and television in Vermont, New York, Maine, Alberta, Canada and Perugia, Italy. In addition to performances in New England, concerts have taken Mr. Pauley to Arizona, Florida, Alabama, Kentucky, Vermont, New York, Michigan, Maine, Pennsylvania, Louisiana, Massachusetts and California. October of 2013 marked the beginning of a three year, nine concert series of the 32 piano sonatas of Beethoven. A schedule of Mr. Pauley’s upcoming concerts can be found at greggpauley.com.

Mr. Pauley lives with his family in New Hampshire, where he maintains two teaching studios. He was the director of programs at Music Fest Perugia in Perugia, Italy, from 2007 to 2012 and has been on the piano faculty at Tufts University, St. Paul’s School, and the Concord Community Music School in Concord, New Hampshire. (Monday, April 24, 2017: MasterClass with Students Performers)