ACME Spotlight: Meet Deon Nielsen Price By Mary Au

ACME CO-CHAIR MARY AU, MU NU, LOS ANGELES ALUMNI AUHAUS@GMAIL.COM

eon Nielsen Price is a prolific composer; published author; award-winning pianist, performing and recording artist; choral and instrumental conductor; vocal coach; college adjunct professor; publisher; film composer; church musician; and competition adjudicator. She and her son Berkeley, D.M.A. (Mu Upsilon, Los Angeles Alumni) perform as the clarinet and piano Price Duo, for which she has written a number of works.

Dr. Price serves on the boards as president and past-president of the National Association of Composers, USA (NACUSA) and the International Alliance for Women in Music (IAWM). She has also been an officer in Mu Phi Epsilon International Music Fraternity (MFE) and the International Congress on Women in Music (ICWM) and is a member of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP). Since 2017, she has been composer-in-residence and curator of the Sunday Concert Series for the Interfaith Center at the Presidio.

Since joining Mu Phi Epsilon in 1961, Deon has won multiple awards from the Fraternity and the Foundation including the Marian Davidson Accompanying Award, Liana K. Sandin Grant-in-Aid, Composition Winner in Large Works category, MFE Helen Haupt Alumni Chapter Project Grant to Los Angeles Alumni Chapter, MFE Travel grant, Los Angeles Alumni Chapter Grant, James and Lola Faust Chamber Music Award, and the Orah Ashley Lamke Distinguished Alumni Award.

She is author of “Accompanying Skills for Pianists, 2nd Edition,” and the manual, “SightPlay with Skillful Eyes” (Culver Crest Publications). She has written articles on piano accompanying and sight-playing for Clavier Magazine and Keyboard Companion and edited the text College Class Piano-Comprehensive Approach (Demibach Editions; Reading Keyboard Music, Ltd.).

Information about her musical compositions and books is online at www.culvercrest.com. Her works are archived at the Brigham Young University Harold B. Lee Library in Special Collections. Many are recorded on the Cambria and Albany labels distributed by NAXOS.

Dr. Price earned her Bachelor of Arts at Brigham Young University, 1954; Master of Music at University of Michigan, 1961; and Doctor of Musical Arts with Honors in Accompanying at University of Southern California, 1977. She is wife to the late psychologist Kendall O. Price, Ph.D., and mother of 5 children, 18 grandchildren, and 12 great-grandchildren.

For Deon Nielsen Price (Gamma, LA Alumni), music is a constant and irreplaceable factor in her life. A holistic doctor once told her, “Pay attention to your own musical compositions; they tell you who you are.” For nearly 70 years, since 1951, Deon has been a professional musician as pianist, composer, conductor, music educator, church musician, author, and advocate for living composers, especially women, “driven by an insatiable appetite for music and a yearning always toward perfection in the realization of the score,” she says. She still regularly plays piano and composes music and has no intention of stopping. Her motivational attitude that she was gifted with since birth remains with her to this very day. “May I have continued energy and ambition to complete more musical projects,” she says, at age 86.

What prompted you to learn the piano initially?

I begged for a piano from the time I was 4 years old and my family finally bought one when I was 7. My first lessons were when I was in second grade. I was excused from class (It was arithmetic) for two 20-minute lessons a week in the room down the hall.

Where were you trained?

We moved about every three years when I was growing up; I studied with teachers wherever my father was stationed in the

U.S. Army: Dupont, Washington; Palm Springs, California;

Seattle, Washington; Panama Canal Zone; San Francisco; then

Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah; Akademia Pro Arte in Heidelberg, Germany; University of Michigan in Ann Arbor;

UCLA Extension in Los Angeles; University of Southern

California. I am still developing my musical skills.

When you were going to college, how did you manage your time between being a mother, a wife, a student, a church musician, and a performing artist?

We scheduled every hour of every day. The two children napped at the same time, they went to bed at 7 p.m., and my practice time was from 7 to 10 p.m., plus five hours on Saturday and five hours on Sunday. We did all the chores, cooking, and housework with the children while they were awake. Their sleep-time was my practice and performance time. Performing was mostly local when the children were small. My husband was in graduate school also and studied with his cohorts every evening. He came home to bathe and enjoy the children from 5 to 6 p.m. while I prepared dinner for the family and our four

Deon Nielsen Price takes center stage for the final bows from the premiere of her light opera, “Light of Man and Woman.”

roomers and total of six boarders, who were paying my graduate school tuition. Church music rehearsals and services were mostly on Sunday only. I was primarily doing choral conducting in church at that time, some composing and arranging of church music, and sometimes playing organ. I had a babysitter while I attended classes — just a five-minute walk from home. Both my husband and I were steeped in study. As our graduate schooling neared the end, I was offered a professional opportunity as a pianist, which would perhaps have catapulted my career. I turned it down, however, because, at the same time my husband was writing his doctoral dissertation and needed my help for extensive editing.

Besides the classical masters (Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Debussy, Stravinsky and Bartok), which composers do you admire and why?

I generally admire contemporary composers whose music I find both intriguing musically and enjoyable to listen to. These are too many to name. Composer members of Mu Phi Epsilon whose music I admire are Chen Yi (Alpha Kappa), Mary Lou

Newmark (Mu Chi), Alex Shapiro (Phi Nu), Adrienne Albert (Phi Nu), and Carol Worthey (Phi Nu). A few of the composers in the National Association of Composers USA (NACUSA) who have composed works I admire include Gernot Wolfgang,

Daniel Kessner, Deborah Kavasch (Delta Alpha), Nancy Bloomer Deussen (Mu Nu), Sandra Bostrom-Aguado, Frank Campo, Richard Derby, and Jeannie Pool. Composers in the International Alliance for Women in Music (IAWM) would include, among others, Hilary Tann, Sally Reid, Beverly Grigsby, Patsy Rodgers, Li Yiding, Joan Huang and Zenobia Powell Perry (Gamma Eta).

How is being a woman composer today different from when you were starting out?

Generally speaking, I believe women composers are accepted quite well in new music circles today even though their compositions continue to be only rarely included in the seasons of major orchestras. For me, personally, as a graduate student at

The University of Michigan, my works were performed as soon as the ink was dry, often on Mu Phi Epsilon concerts. That is still true today for many of my works; in 2019, I composed two one-act chamber operas, and both received workshop performances in 2019.

I am often commissioned by specific performers who are ready then to perform the works. However, as a doctoral candidate at the University of Southern California (USC), I had both negative and positive experiences. One, when applying to pursue a Ph.D. in composition in 1972, the department chair glanced at my work and dismissed me saying that you don’t have to have a degree to compose. Two, on a NACUSA (National Association of Composers/USA) concert held at the

Arnold Schoenberg Institute, at which German and Austrian

Schoenberg society patrons were in attendance, my new work “Stile Antico” for solo cello was performed. There was enthusiastic applause, so I stood up in the audience to acknowledge it. Immediately there was a wall of absolute silence. During the reception no one spoke to me and seemed to look right through me. It was like “How dare I presume to be a serious composer?” Three, when I took my first work for full orchestra to the USC Symphony conductor, he glanced at it and bellowed, “Why did you write it?” Also, at USC, I had positive experiences: As soon as I was accepted into the D.M.A. program in piano, there was a lot of interest in the compositions that had been languishing in a drawer. There was even a time in the late 1970s and early 1980s that performers called me “the most performed living Los Angeles composer.”

How do you decide on instrumentation?

Usually I have composed for the instrumentalists and singers with whom I collaborated in performances. I have also received commissions from other singers and instrumentalists, and chamber ensembles.

What are some challenges of writing for different kinds of instruments?

The challenges are making the most of each instrument in the musical texture they are part of, including being aware of the qualities of each instrument in various registers, writing parts that enhance those qualities, and giving the piano and other instruments parts that allow each instrument to shine and not be covered up. Here are just a few observations:

Clarinets have a beautiful rich low chalumeau register with a piercing ultra-high register and a clear middle range for sweet melodies. Saxophones have a rich large sound and can handle rapid skips of large intervals with ease. String instruments generally need a stronger support when they play in a high register but minimal support when they play in a middle or low register. Vocalists are strong in certain registers and weak in others, depending on the voice type and the individual singer.

How do you pick vocal lyrics?

I look first at the meaning of the poetry, then the suitability of the words for setting. I prefer simplicity in the words, few syllables, long vowels, and some rhythmic ideas when speaking the poem. I read books of poetry to search for poems to set, such as Walt Whitman, Maya Angelou, and Carol Lynn Pearson. Singers sometimes give me texts to set. I sometimes write my own lyrics or adapt words from writings such as scriptures of different religions.

You have taught a course in sight-reading. Why is it important for all musicians to be good at sight-reading?

My sight-reading course is for pianists and is called sight-playing, the ability to see what’s on the page with instant response of the fingers. The word sight-reading implies a thinking process in the brain, but that takes too much time. The technique for efficient use of the eyes along with the relevant exercises is included in my text “Accompanying Skills for Pianists, 2nd Edition.”

How important is it for non-pianists to gain proficiency in piano?

Proficiency in piano helps singers and instrumentalists who usually play only one horizontal line to think and hear vertically also. When they listen to the harmonies so they can tweak the pitch a bit as the ear demands; when they understand the function of the note they are playing in the line, they can “lean on” appoggiaturas, produce the resolution of dissonances, et cetera.

In studio teaching, the instructor who plays piano accompaniments for their vocal or instrumental students do not need to rely on hiring accompanists.

What advice do you have for those interested in a music career?

Get the highest level of training possible in your area with the best teacher you can find. Aim for the top. In addition, prepare for a practical way to support yourself and your music. This could be in commercial music, video games, music education, piano pedagogy, arts administration, or in another field altogether. You will undoubtedly need to rely on such practical skills at some time in your life. Keep learning. Music is more than a lifetime study.

ACME Nominations ACME recognition highlights the strengths and accomplishments of our fraternity’s Artists, Composers, Musicologists and Educators. We encourage members to nominate deserving, actively affiliated candidates who have achieved national and/or international acclaim in their music fields for ACME consideration. Nomination information is at muphiepsilon.org (click About, Honors & Awards, ACME).