There has never been a time in my life that I can think of when I was without music. It has always played a significant role in all my upbringing and adulthood. I began piano lessons, just shy of my fourth birthday. I gave my first piano performance when I was four years old and then I was hooked. I continued lessons throughout all of my secondary education, discovering the great classical literature when I was 11 when I started going to a school of fine arts in north, eastern Ohio. I began teaching piano when I was in high school, and I knew that I would continue music seriously when going to college. I also loved sports and received a full athletic scholarship to Wake Forest University in North Carolina to be a punter on the football team.

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I started out as a business major with a minor in music at Wake Forest, but quickly discovered that I was destined to pursue piano performance as my main degree program and began my piano performance studies under professor Louis Goldstein. Winning several university competitions and performing my senior recital featuring works by Beethoven, Scarlatti, and Liszt, I decided to seek a graduate program. I was accepted at the University of Michigan School of Music in Ann Arbor Michigan, with a full tuition scholarship to pursue a masters degree in piano performance, under the Steinway artist Arthur Greene. It was at Michigan where I also studied piano pedagogy fulfilling my scholarship requirements by being in a teachers assistantship program, teaching individual and classroom piano. I also continued my piano performance degree curriculum, and after winning the university piano concerto competition and giving a performance of the Brahms first piano concerto with the school orchestra, I completed my masters in music degree with a senior recital featuring works by Haydn, Granados, and Brahms.

 

I also became very interested in learning how to fix, repair, and tune pianos while at Michigan, and took on an apprenticeship in the piano technology department, working throughout the school's two year master's program and the summer in between studying the art of tuning and fixing pianos under the guidance of Steinway technician, Bob Grijalva. From this experience, this led me to pursue a degree in mechanical engineering at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in Terre Haute Indiana, in hopes of someday, working for a major piano manufacturer, but my heart stayed very close to piano performance and teaching. I was also a football coach and artist-in-resident at RoseHolman. I completed my engineering degree in 1995. My life took a quick turn, knowing that in order to work at a piano company, I would most likely need to live in Europe, or in the Asian pacific region, because there were only three piano manufacturers left in the United States.

 

In 1996, I moved to Colorado and found professional engineering work in the government contract arena in Colorado Springs, and have been working in that field ever since. Listening to my heart brought me back to music quickly and I began entering international amateur piano competitions after reading about a local pianist winning an international piano amateur competition in Paris. I received piano coaching starting Michael Baron from 2002 to 2005, and Steinway artist Yelena Balabanova from 2005 on. After four years of various competitions and placing fourth place in the Paris International Competition for Outstanding Piano Amateurs (2003), honorable mention in the Cliburn International Amateur Piano Competition (2004) fourth place in the Berlin International (2006), and first place in the Rocky Mountain International (2006),  I was invited to be a part of Les Amateurs Virtuoses which selects top amateur pianist from around the world to perform at various festivals and venuues globally. from these opportunities, I have performed solo recitals in Paris, Shanghai, China, St. Petersburg, Russia, Buenos Aires, Argentina, and Cape Town, South Africa in the last 15 years, with a recent performance in the Newport Amateur Piano Festival in Rhode Island in association with the Newport classical series.

 

With all of my experiences and honors in pursuing these wonderful performance opportunities in the last two decades, I also open the Colorado School of Music in Larkspur, Colorado starting in 2003 and have been teaching piano ever since. I not only love to teach, but feel it to be necessary for giving back to the music community passing on the wonderful tradition and discipline of the great classical literature. I have a fierce love of working with people, and sharing my music passion with them. I’ve had plenty of experience working with students of all levels and skills from beginners to advanced with one student withe one student who received his masters degree and another student, his doctorate in piano performance. No matter who I am teaching, I thrive on seeing my students grow and develop as they discover what they can achieve, but always putting the joy of learning piano, and discovering how special it is to just play the piano.