Clara Christian, pianist
Clara Campbell Christian
pianist. performer. educator.
Dr. Clara Christian is Associate Professor of Music at College of the Ozarks in Point Lookout, MO. She has a D.M.A. in Piano Performance and Pedagogy from Northwestern University's Bienen School of Music and an Masters of Music degree from the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University.
She has performed throughout the U.S, in France, and in St. Petersburg, Russia and is active as both a soloist and as a collaborative artist; she is pianist for the clarinet-saxophone-piano trio FuseTrio. (www.fusetrio.com)
Dr. Christian is committed to performing new music and plays works by many contemporary composers in addition to doing her own arranging. Her graduate work included research and performances of Sergei Prokofiev and the American composers Samuel Barber and Roy Harris. She was a finalist in the 2017 International Franz Liszt competition.
Dr. Christian has nine years of experience in collegiate teaching, and has worked with pre-collegiate piano students for over 20 years. She has given pedagogy presentations at the local, state, and national level on a variety of subjects, including group teaching, introducing early classical repertoire, and teaching students with ADHD.
Dr. Christian teaches applied piano, piano pedagogy, collaborative piano, piano literature, music history, and class piano at College of the Ozarks; she is now in her eighth year of teaching there. She works with piano majors, piano minors, and non-music majors, and her students have won awards both at the state and national level.
Dr. Christian is adviser for the MTNA Collegiate Chapter at the College of the Ozarks. The college hosts a Fall Piano Festival on campus every October for area music teachers and their students as well as a Summer Piano Camp. A frequent adjudicator for pre-college piano auditions and competitions, she is passionate about enabling students of all ages to be able to play with a comfortable, versatile approach to the keyboard.