PATRICIA STOWELL — PIANO
Pianist Patricia Stowell loves teaching at Bay Chamber in addition to having private students in Bangor where she resides as an independent performing artist and chamber musician. For 20 years she directed the Kneisel Hall Maine Young Musicians Program where she continues to teach chamber music each June in Blue Hill, Maine. Patricia enjoys presenting master classes and adjudicating competitions, and also was a founding member of the Chamber Music Society at the Collins Center for the Arts, which she chaired for 15 years. Her European appearances include performances in Germany, Poland, Austria and Bulgaria, where she presented master classes in prestigious conservatories. Her love for eastern European composers led her to lecturing in Moscow on composer Alexander Scriabin and the Russian Symbolist Movement, which was her dissertation topic for her doctorate at Northwestern University.
Learn more about pATRICIA’s teaching philosophy
Describe your approach to teaching?
One thing I stress in my lessons is how to practice. I often say, "You have a set of seven drawers, which drawer should you pull out for this issue?" We investigate the style of the composer and the character of the work and then identify what technique would serve it best. It’s always about the music and how to distinguish between different qualities and characteristics which determine style.
What drew you to MUSIC AND THE piano?
My mother played piano and said when I was two, I crawled up to the piano. She said I didn’t just bang on the piano, I started to play chords and Merry Had a Little Lamb…little tunes by ear. When I was three, she tried to find someone to teach me but nobody would take me so she asked a teacher friend to show her how to teach. I can actually remember my first lesson with my mother. She was a great teacher! I always thought playing by ear was a given, but realized at a young age that is not the case. I try to incorporate ear training into my teaching and often tell students, “okay, next week I want you to play Twinkle Twinkle in five different keys.” I was really young—5 years old—when I thought I wanted to be a pianist. I had superior teachers growing up. One came down through the Tobias Matthay school—a British teacher who was all about teaching musicality. The other school came later in my Doctoral years from Donald Isaak whose teacher was Carl Friedberg at Juilliard, who had studied with Clara Schumann. The first public concert Friedberg gave at age 17 was an all-Brahms program which he later coached with Brahms. Friedberg focused on style, character, the musical expressiveness of each composer plus how to use different techniques to serve the music. I feel I have these wonderful tips from a long, rich tradition. I’ve been the beneficiary of this amazing teaching.