KATHLEEN TAGG: TEACHING

Kathleen has been known for her creative, innovative, holistic and highly skilled approach to teaching for more than 25 years. Her students have ranged from beginners young and old, to graduate students at leading conservatories. She is on the piano faculty of Columbia University.

She guided doctoral piano students in their teaching practicums at the Manhattan School of Music, as well as designing curriculums and materials that were used for years after her departure. She has taught piano, chamber music and creation/collaboration in a wide variety of settings, but has also given workshops, masterclasses, talks and residencies on creative collaboration, finding a unique voice, music technology, producing and cross-genre and cross-cultural work, piano skills, ear training, keyboard harmony and practical musicianship.

Kathleen’s teaching philosophy is rooted in a belief that each individual has unique capabilities and needs that need to be developed in a way that makes sense to the learner. She firmly believe in nurturing the individual to become the best version of what they are striving for, and her ultimate goal is to pass on tools for her students to develop their own distinct musical voices, to be able to follow their passions with joy, while connection their artistic desires to their life goals.

Kathleen holds a Doctorate of Musical Arts from the Manhattan School of Music (receiving the Helen Cohn award as the top doctoral graduate), where she taught as adjunct faculty for four years, as well as a Masters from Mannes School of Music (The New School) and undergraduate and a one-year graduate degree from the University of Cape Town, South Africa. She served on the faculty of SongFest at Colburn in Los Angeles from 2013-2016. She also taught at the University of Cape Town prior to moving to the USA, and has maintained a private New York-based teaching studio as well as teaching at the Horace Mann School, Bronx Conservatory, Great Neck Conservatory and Piano School of New York City. She regularly teaches at the Manhattan School of Music pre-college program.

She has presented workshops, talks and masterclasses throughout the USA, southern Africa and India, including Brandeis University, Smith College, University of Georgia, Connecticut College, and in 2016 was the inaugural Artist in Residence at Brown University. She was also an Artist in Residence with the 92nd St Y’s Music for Tomorrow Program and at the Ecole Internationale in Geneva, Switzerland. In 2018 she spent a month at the University of the Witwatersrand (WITS) working with the composition students. Her work in artistic dialogue includes the large-scale collaborative musical dialogue/education project, Keepers of the Flame, which was originally created for the Center for Dialogue at the Borderlands Foundation in Sejny, Poland.

A NOTE FROM KATHY:

A large part of my informal, yet vital education has come from my immersion in many aspects of performance and creation, and each of these experiences has contributed to my growth as a musician and human, providing another piece of my total musicianship and teaching .As a young musician, both during my studies and the initial years after receiving my doctorate from the Manhattan School of Music, I had an active professional life as a freelance performer, recitalist, contemporary music performer, chamber musician, collaborative musician and arranger, repetiteur, coach, studio pianist and music director. During that time I did more or less every kind of job that a pianist could do at an international level. Whilst all of my studies were officially as a solo pianist, I have spent much of my professional life collaborating with other artists. I believe that these experiences as a performer and creator have helped me to be a well-rounded, insightful and deeply practical musician with much to offer my students.

While still maintaining my deep commitment to the core classical piano canon, over the past decade, I have additionally explored other outlets; from collaborations with living composers, to the creation of new projects using technology and deeply integrated multi-media components to inter-genre work with musicians from other disciplines. I have additionally created my own very personal body of original work that continues to gain audiences around the world. Other facets of my life have included producing all of my own albums, a skill that I believe has growing importance in today’s world; curating festivals and performances; acting as co-Artistic Director for Table Pounding Music, an organization dedicated to the creation and fostering of diverse projects celebrating shared humanity; creating new work and organizing benefit concerts and large musical fund-raising efforts for organizations such as the ACLU and NAACP.

These choices have allowed me to gain a wide range of experiences in the music profession that I might not have had if I had solely pursued my career in a strictly linear fashion. I believe that this range of activities has given me a unique perspective that has been instructive for the many music students I have met over the years who are seeking careers in a constantly changing 21st century job market. I have a very keen interest in mentoring young musicians in a wide variety of contexts, and actively pursue opportunities do so in practical ways, from musical mentorship to career advice to help with visas, how-tos and advocacy work.

This is combined with elements gleaned from all of my major teachers that I have put together in my own way. Each of my teachers at the University of Cape Town, Mannes School of Music and Manhattan School of Music came from very different schools of thinking, teaching and playing. I employ a deeply structural/harmonic approach learned from Lamar Crowson (American former professor at the Royal College of Music in London who taught in South Africa in the latter part of his life); an extremely detailed and systematic approach to building technique as well as practice and memorization skills from Graham Fitch (British pedagogue who taught in South African at a pivotal time in my pianistic development) and a sense of physical ease, trust in my instincts and aesthetics learned from Nina Svetlanova (the last student of Heinrich Neuhaus), with whom I studied in New York. Each of these teachers left a strong imprint on me, as did the musicianship of key collaborators in my life, most notably clarinetists David Krakauer and Kinan Azmeh and jazz pianist Andre Petersen, each of whom opened my thinking and musicianship to vast new possibilities. Additionally, getting to learn from traditional master Dizu Plaatjies as a student at a time when the mandate of the University of Cape Town was to be a world-class African university, had a vital impact on my life. I have assimilated all of these pedagogical systems, ways of thinking and approaches to music-making into my own personal teaching style. I focus on the core canon of classical music, but have a fervent interest in the music of our time, and of the music of composers previously ignored.

I believe that in today’s world, students need to graduate equipped for a 21st century career, and believe that to excel and to break rules, students have to first have very strong fundamentals and skills, and a deep understanding of the context and structure of the music they are performing, whatever that may be. As a performer, I have been lucky enough to work in an incredibly wide array of settings, from recitalist to contemporary music performer to chamber musician and collaborative musician, as well as being a performer of my own work and collaboratively conceived projects. All of these experiences are wrapped up in my own musicianship, and I bring all of this to my teaching. I believe that my wide array of experiences allows me to be an open-minded teacher interested in the individual needs of my students, whatever their background.