Pianist, Composer, Educator

 

Acclaimed American pianist Kathryn Woodard has performed numerous premieres and collaborated with several composers including Allen Otte, Paula Matthusen and Ge Gan-ru. Her international performances have taken her to China, Korea, Croatia, Thailand, Germany, and Turkey. She has also served as an American Cultural Specialist for the U.S. Department of State, leading educational initiatives in Kyrgyzstan to introduce audiences to new American music. In the U.S. she has performed at such notable venues as Carnegie Hall, the Freer Gallery at the Smithsonian Institution, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Detroit Institute of Art, and the Dallas Museum of Art. In 1997 she began researching the Turkish composer Ahmed Adnan Saygun and has since given numerous performances of solo piano music from Turkey and across Asia. Her recordings have been broadcast widely and select performances have been featured on Performance Today (PRI) and The Front Row (Houston). 

Kathryn Woodard's original music spans genres and styles – from pedagogical repertoire for young piano students to avant-garde improvisation in collaboration with other musicians. Early such collaborations included work with composer-percussionist Allen Otte to provide incidental music for stagings of madrigals by Gesualdo and Monteverdi at the Lucca Opera Festival in 1997 and 1998. She also collaborated with Paula Matthusen on several projects, including the 2002 electro-acoustic work … run-on sentence of the pavement, for which she provided recorded samples and live improvisation. Woodard’s set of improvisations for prepared piano, Lyric Suite, was released on CD in 2008 and since then she has composed numerous works for solo piano. Her chamber works have received performances by SpliThesis in Croatia and at the Music By Women Festival sponsored by the Mississippi University for Women. The latter presented the world premiere of Budapest 1919 (briefly interrupted by a tornado siren), a song cycle based on texts from the English translation by George Szirtes of Deszö Kostolanyi’s novel, Anna Edes (1926). Woodard’s musical influences are wide ranging and include early modernist composers, such as Schoenberg, Bartok, and Saygun, the prepared piano music of John Cage, and her experiences learning West African drumming and Indonesian gamelan.   

A native of Dallas, Texas, Kathryn Woodard holds the DMA and MM degrees in piano performance from the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music and earned an undergraduate diploma in music pedagogy from the Hochschule für Musik in Munich, Germany. After holding academic appointments at CUNY Hunter College and Texas A&M University, she now focuses on pedagogical initiatives that reach piano students of all ages, including publications of the music she has researched. Visit www.soniccrossroads.com to learn more. 

 

Featuring an improvisation by Kathryn Woodard:

 

 

 

From the press:

 “Her playing is clear and lucid… She has created a highly personal style…”

-- Fanfare

“… nothing short of stunning.” -- The Washington Post

“… both a formidable technician and a sensitive artist.”

-- The Dallas Morning News   

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

~Join Kathryn in Vienna (June 24-28, 2024) for a professional development workshop in teaching young students composition!

~New videos of piano works by Kathryn are on the compositions page

~Listen to Victory March by Leyla Saz and arranged for concert band by Kathryn at And We Were Heard...

 

 

Listen to Kathryn