Concerts
Tradition and Transformation: Learning, Playing, and Teaching Outside the Box

photo Tony Caramia
Tony Caramia is Professor of Piano at the Eastman School of Music, where he teaches piano and is Director of Piano Pedagogy Studies. In May 2003, he was a guest on NPR's "Piano Jazz" with Marian McPartland. His latest solo CD, Tribute, features the music of Ellington, McPartland, Brubeck, as well as original compositions.

photo Phillip Keveren
Phillip Keveren presents keyboard concerts and publishing workshops in over 50 cities a year. Recent tours have taken him to Australia, Southeast Asia, Taiwan, and the United Kingdom. Keveren is co-author, major composer and MIDI orchestrator of the Hal Leonard Student Piano Library. His unique arrangements are also featured in The Phillip Keveren Series from Hal Leonard. Mr. Keveren holds a Bachelor of Music in Composition from California State University, Northridge, and a Master of Music in Composition from the University of Southern California.

photo Richard Kogan, Conference Artist
Richard Kogan has a distinguished career both as a concert pianist and as a psychiatrist. He has been praised for his "eloquent, compelling, and exquisite playing" by the New York Times and the Boston Globe wrote that "Kogan has somehow managed to excel at the world's two most demanding professions." He has gained international renown for his groundbreaking work on the connections between music and healing and on the influence of medical and psychiatric illnesses on the creative output of composers such as Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, Tchaikovsky, Gershwin, and Leonard Bernstein. His DVD entitled Music and the Mind: The Life and Works of Robert Schumann was recently released by the Yamaha Corporation. Dr. Kogan is a first-prize winner of the Concert Artists Guild Award and the Chopin Competition of the Kosciuszko Foundation, and he was a recipient of the 2005 Artsgenesis Creative Achievement Award. He is a frequent chamber music collaborator with cellist Yo-Yo Ma.

Dr. Kogan is a graduate of the Juilliard School of Music and of Harvard College and Harvard Medical School. He completed his psychiatry residency training at NYU. He currently has a private practice of psychiatry in New York City and is affiliated with the Weill-Cornell Medical School as Director of its Human Sexuality Program.

Music and the Mind : George Gershwin

What are the essential factors in the development of creative genius? Concert pianist and distinguished psychiatrist Dr. Richard Kogan will explore this question through an examination of the life and works of George Gershwin (1898-1937), one of the greatest and most beloved composers in American history. Among the more remarkable facets of Gershwin's creative genius was his ability to extract music out of what others would consider mere noise (listening to the honking of Parisian taxi horns inspired him to write "An American in Paris") and his ability to fuse the previously distinct classical, jazz, and Broadway show tune traditions.

Dr. Kogan will perform "Rhapsody in Blue", Earl Wild's piano transcription of "Porgy and Bess" and other musical examples in order to illustrate the connections between Gershwin's psyche and his musical output. Particular attention will be focused on aspects of the story relevant to Gershwin's mental health, including his chronic hyperactivity and his unrestrained narcissism and his depressive episode that was treated by a psychoanalyst who missed the clues that Gershwin was suffering from the brain tumor that would eventually kill him. Dr. Kogan will demonstrate the extraordinary healing potential of music by showing how exposure to music transformed Gershwin's life as a troubled youngster.

photo Carol Leone
Pianist Carol Leone is nationally recognized as a performing artist, teacher, lecturer, and author. An international competition prizewinner, she has performed and lectured throughout the US, Europe, and in South Korea. Dr. Leone is a piano professor at Southern Methodist University's Meadows School of the Arts, where she is Chair of the Keyboard Department.

Smaller piano keyboards are opening up new frontiers for small-handed pianists and children who desire powerful, pain-free performance. A growing number of studies are showing that reduced-sized keyboards have significant musical, technical, pedagogical, and physiological implications. Reduced-size piano keyboards are now offered as an option for performance study at Southern Methodist University, the University of North Texas, the University of Nebraska, and Texas Tech University. Dr. Leone will perform on a Steinway piano with a Steinbuehler 7/8-sized keyboard.

photo Spencer Myer
Spencer Myer is rapidly establishing himself as one of the most outstanding young pianists of his generation. He is the 2006 Christel DeHaan Classical Fellow of the American Pianists Association. In 2004, he was named First Prize winner in the UNISA International Piano Competition in Pretoria, South Africa, and has first prizes in the 2002 Heida Hermanns International Piano Competition, the 2003 Artists International New York Debut Auditions, and the 2003 Five Towns Music & Art Foundation Competition. Mr. Myer holds degrees from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, The Juilliard School of Music, and is currently completing his doctoral studies at Stony Brook University.

MTNA Winners' Recital
Thursday evening's recital features exciting performances by the national winners of the 2007 MTNA Piano Performance Competitions: