Paul Nitsch, D.M.A.

Biography

Paul Nitsch is the Carolyn G. McMahon Professor of Music and the Macavity Artist-in-Residence on the faculty of Queens University of Charlotte, North Carolina. He has been a member of the faculty at Queens since 1977.

For twelve years, Dr. Nitsch was the Assistant to the Director, Pianist-in-Residence, and Pianist of the Garth Newel Piano Trio at the Garth Newel Music Center in Hot Springs, Virginia. He subsequently served for nine years as Artistic Director for the Fontana Concert Society in Kalamazoo, Michigan, where he earned an ASCAP award for “adventuresome programming.” He retired as Executive Director for the Swannanoa Chamber Music Festival in Asheville, NC. He is also the co-founding director for the Bechlter Ensemble, in collaboration with Tanja Bechtler and the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art in Charlotte, NC. He has been a guest pianist at the Bennington Chamber Music Conference, at Bennington College in Vermont and was invited as a Guest Faculty to present master classes at the first annual Palmetto International Piano Festival, scheduled to open in summer, 2021.

He is particularly devoted to the study and performance of chamber music with piano. He has collaborated with many ensembles, including the Solaris Wind Quintet and the Cavani String Quartet, and many other chamber musicians in frequent performances of almost all of the standard piano chamber music literature during the last four decades, as well as many contemporary and commissioned works. His performances have been heard nationally on National Public Radio, as well as locally on WQXR in New York City, WCLV in Cleveland, and in Michigan, Virginia and North Carolina.

Paul Nitsch was born in Great Bend, Kansas, and grew up in Boulder, Colorado. He studied piano with professors George Crumb, David Burge, and Paul Parmelee at the University of Colorado during his junior high and high school years.

Dr. Nitsch earned the Bachelors and Masters degrees in piano performance at the Peabody Conservatory of Music in Baltimore, Maryland. His teachers there were Walter Hautzig and Leon Fleisher. He was awarded two Fulbright Scholarship Grants for study with Dieter Weber and Noel Flores at the Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst in Vienna, Austria. He earned his Doctor of Musical Arts degree in Collaborative Piano at the Cleveland Institute of Music with pianist Anne Epperson. He has also been an adjudicator for numerous piano festivals and competitions in GA, SC and NC, as well as for the prestigious Fischoff National Chamber Music Competition at Notre Dame University, and the Wolff-Bing Chamber Music Competition at Wichita State University.

Students of Dr. Nitsch have gone on to attend the most prestigious conservatories and music schools in the US, including the Cleveland Institute, The Curtis Institute, The Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University, The Juilliard School, Manhattan School of Music, Oberlin College/Conservatory, and Yale University, among others. Many of his students have captured top prizes in all local and regional piano competitions.

Education

D.M.A., Cleveland Institute of Music
M.Mus., B.Mus., Peabody Conservatory of Music