Today we’d like to introduce you to Kyle Adam Blair.
Kyle, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
Musically, I started playing the piano at the age of seven through my grandparents’ church, played euphonium and trumpet from age ten through college, and taught myself the guitar at age 15 in order to play punk rock music with my friends for crowds of about ten fiercely loyal fans. In high school, I sang in and accompanied high school choirs, and played Fred/Petruchio in the musical Kiss Me, Kate and Ren in Footloose.
Toward the end of my high school years, I chose to pursue music professionally because I found performing to be my strangest, most difficult passion. I would not call myself someone who had an innate talent for art in any form. A potent combination of curiosity about music and the challenges I faced in practicing and performing instilled a sense of hard-headed diligence that forced me to keep at it. Music was both the thing that brought me the most joy, and also the most confusion!
My piano teacher through high school, Ann Staples, had a connection to the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and encouraged me to apply. I was fortunate to receive a scholarship to attend UNC Greensboro and study with Dr. Andrew Willis, a historical keyboard expert and a marvelously open-minded teacher who fostered my initial instincts to play music written by composers alive today. While at UNCG, I also accompanied a number of my close singer friends and had a lovely opportunity to work with local youth theatre.
Although I wanted to continue my piano studies at a graduate level, my initial search for a Master’s program to call home was completely unsuccessful. Out of that failure, as a last-ditch effort of sorts, I was miraculously granted an opportunity to study for one year in Baltimore, at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. The one-year program was uniquely suited to my interests, as it focused intensely on American contemporary music. Many of the faculty at UMBC either attended or had connections to UC San Diego, so after a much more successful round of Master’s auditions, I was thrilled to be accepted into UC San Diego, the perfect venue for my graduate studies with an incredible faculty and beautifully talented, creative peers. I completed my Doctor of Musical Arts degree in Contemporary Music Performance in 2018, and have been enjoying the San Diego weather ever since.
We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
There has been a bit of a struggle in my career, but it’s not what you might think, and it points to a much larger global struggle in the classical music world. I came to San Diego in 2011 specifically to study piano at UCSD with Aleck Karis, an idol of mine teaching at a world-renowned epicenter of contemporary classical music in the United States. Classical piano music has a rich history spanning hundreds of years, but I made up my mind in 2009 that I wanted to focus on music being written by people alive right now.
Along the way, certain composers and pieces of classical music have been deemed more important than others. Those composers and pieces dominate the majority of classical music we hear in the United States. I’ve chosen to focus my efforts on performing new music written by composers here-and-now, so my path runs counter to the history-oriented classical music performances of the United States’ symphony orchestras, opera houses and concert halls. I find it difficult to amplify contemporary voices when the sounds are drowned out by repeated performances of a handful of historical composers over and over again. That might be a struggle, but I chose it.
The far greater struggle is that classical music we hear is predominantly written by white men. Countless symphony orchestra concerts do not include a single piece written by a non-male or a person of color. While I chose my struggle as a performer, composers of color, women, trans and non-binary composers did not choose the difficulties they face in trying to pierce their voices through the roar of the status quo.
While at UCSD, I have had the blessing of hearing and working with some of the finest composers I can name. Celeste Oram, Yvonne Wu, Elisabet Curbelo, Anahita Abbasi, Fernanda Aoki Navarro, Tina Tallon, Annie Hui-Hsin Hsieh, Caroline Miller, Lydia Winsor Brindamour, Tiange Zhou, Anqi Liu, Sammi Jo Stone, Jasper Sussman, Nasim Khorassani, Janet Sit, Erin Graham….
San Diego should get to know them well, and should be proud to have had these amazing composers here. I had the extreme privilege to experience their incredibly unique, clever, beautiful voices during my decade at UCSD, and I’ll keep trying my best to amplify them.
We’d love to hear more about your music.
If someone were to ask me specifically what I do, I’d say that I’m primarily a pianist. However, I see myself as a bit of a jack-of-all-trades musician, so I’d likely also say that I’m an accompanist, vocal coach, music director, and teacher.
Before the impact of COVID-19, I spent a large percentage of my time rehearsing and preparing for multiple performances simultaneously, a combination of solo piano concerts, collaborations with singers, and appearances with various musical ensembles. In the past year I released my debut solo piano album, “Palm Sunday”, on New World Records, accompanied many talented singers in a showcase of composer George Gianopoulos with San Diego’s Musica Vitale, and performed with the San Diego Ballet alongside pianist Mark Polesky.
I have two major performances currently slated for February 2021. I will be performing Carlos Chávez’s Piano Concerto with the La Jolla Symphony and Chorus, under the direction of Steven Schick, and through project[BLANK], co-directed by Leslie Ann Leytham and Brendan Nguyen, baritone Jonathan Nussman and I will give the second United States performance of Pascal Dusapin’s “O Mensch!”, a 90-minute composition on texts of Nietzsche.
Although I am an active performer locally and abroad, I am mostly likely known within the greater San Diego community through my work as a vocal coach, music director, and teacher. I serve as the Staff Pianist for the UC San Diego Department of Music, where I work closely with Grammy-winning soprano Susan Narucki, rehearsing with graduate and undergraduate student singers and performing alongside them in several artsong recitals and opera productions throughout the academic year. My work at UCSD has also included frequent collaborations with the Department of Theatre and Dance, and has resulted in my performing in, music directing, and/or composing for eight shows in the last seven years, many of which were written by UCSD Theatre and Dance faculty members and MFA playwrights.
Outside of UCSD, I have music directed six shows with the inimitable Joey Landwehr and JCompany Youth Theatre over the past three years. I also coach singers privately and teach piano students of all ages and skill levels, both independently and through Villa Musica, a stellar non-profit community music school led by Dr. Fiona Chatwin.
What were you like growing up?
From a young age I was constantly doing small things over and over again to try and get them exactly right. During halftime while watching my beloved Pittsburgh Steelers, I would head out into the yard and practice kicking field goals over a power line. During family game nights, I would constantly insist on playing the same board game over and over again to try to figure out the best way to win. I would buy cheap, outdated math and chemistry textbooks to work through problems, or try to memorize the periodic table.
That young, curious, obsessive child somehow evolved into a nerdy, punk-rock high school teen, using every excuse to get on stage. In Home, Pennsylvania (population: CA. 500), my close-knit group of seven or eight friends did everything together, forming a number of different rock, punk, and ska bands, competing in high school quiz competitions, and contributing to the boys’ track team.
Through it all, my late father, Charles, helped me to refine obsession into diligence. My beautiful mother, Karen, has always taught me to leave space in the work to include friendship and love, and my dear twin brother Bryan has always shown me that having someone unconditionally by your side through it all makes the work feel worthwhile.
Contact Info:
- Website: http://www.kyle-adam-blair.com/
- Phone: 7244644749
- Email: kyleadamblair@gmail.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kyleadamblair/?hl=en
- Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/kyleadamblair/
Image Credit:
Tina Tallon, Tiange Zhou, Jim Carmody, Manny Rotenberg, Choral Club of San Diego
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