Marvin Blickenstaff is known among piano teachers throughout the country for his teaching, lecturing, performing, and publishing. He has led hundreds of workshops for pianists and piano teachers throughout the world and is a frequent presenter at regional and state conventions of music teachers and for the national conference of the Music Teachers National Association. For sixteen summers he was on the faculty of the International Workshops where he performed and lectured in Canada, Austria, Scotland, Norway, France, and Switzerland. In 1995 and again in 2004 The Registered Piano Teachers of New Zealand sponsored him in concert and workshop tours of that country. The Marvin Blickenstaff Endowment Fund was established in his honor in 2001 by the MTNA. Blickenstaff is Board President of the Frances Clark Center for Keyboard Pedagogy and is on the Executive Planning Committee of the National Conference on Keyboard Pedagogy.
Music Pathways, a 36-book instructional series was co-authored by Blickenstaff, Lynn Freeman Olson, and Louise Bianchi, is a landmark accomplishment in progressive music education that broke new ground in its approach to developing skills in music appreciation, music reading, performance practice, keyboard theory, and technique. He serves as a piano editor for the Frederick Harris Music Company (Toronto) and has co-authored Celebration Series: A Handbook for Teachers, a monumental compendium of pedagogical and contextual commentary that is used by teachers and students throughout North America. His editions of Bach, Beethoven, and Grieg are thoughtfully prepared and carefully researched. Blickenstaff has been on the editorial board of The American Music Teacher and is executive editor of the periodical Keyboard Companion.
Blickenstaff's teaching career is associated with the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill where he taught for nine years and served as Chairman of Instruction in Piano, and with Goshen College (IN) where he taught for over twenty years. He now resides in the greater Philadelphia area and is teaching at The College of New Jersey (Ewing), the Westminster Choir College and Conservatory of Rider University and The New School for Music Study (Princeton) where he directs the PEPS program for advanced students.
Blickenstaff holds degrees from The Oberlin Conservatory of Music and Indiana University where he received both performing and academic honors. His teachers have included Fern Nolte Davidson, Emil Danenberg, and Bela Böszormenyi-Nagy, and he has coached with Leon Fleisher and György Sebök.
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