Tickling the ivories

More than 100 piano teachers and students will gather at Grand Valley this Friday and Saturday for the fourth annual Piano Pedagogy Conference in the Performing Arts Center.

Piano instructors from Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois will attend the two-day seminar, which has grown into the largest independent piano conference in the country, said conference director Helen Marlais, assistant professor of music at GVSU. Sessions run 9:30 a.m.-4:30 p.m. and include workshops with nationally and internationally acclaimed piano clinicians.

The goals of the conference are two-fold, said Marlais: to offer a motivational, affordable, and very high-quality program for piano teachers from throughout the Midwest, and to apprise them of the exceptional music program GVSU offers. About 120 piano teachers and serious students are expected to attend.

Guest clinicians are like the encyclopedia for piano, said Marlais. Maurice Hinson, one of America's most respected authorities on piano literature, will offer sessions on both days. Hinson has performed, lectured, and given master classes worldwide and his books have become standards in the studios of serious piano teachers and students. In 1994 he received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Music Teachers National Association.

Other clinicians are Susan Guy West, who has taught piano pedagogy at Peabody Conservatory and George Mason University; Aviram Reichert, 1997 Van Cliburn medalist and associate professor of music at GVSU; Kurt Ellenberger, director of jazz studies at GVSU; and music faculty Gregory Crowell and Helen Marlais.

A conference highlight will be a recital by Reichert at 4 p.m. Friday in the Louis Armstrong Theatre, Performing Arts Center. The performance is free and open to the public.