James Ramos Memorial Improvisation Masterclass – Dennis Thurmond

Welcome to the CAPMT 2020 Conference, “CAPMT Connects Online 2020”!

Please note that while our CAPMT Conference session information and outline are contained on BigMarker, all sessions will be presented on Zoom and can only be viewed and attended on Zoom.

Please see your email for the Zoom link for all conference sessions including this presentation.

Join us for this James Ramos Memorial Masterclass with conference Clinician, Dennis Thurmond and some talented students of our CAPMT teachers

Dennis Thurmond is the former director of the piano pedagogy program and the DMA 4th Field Electro- Acoustic Media at the Thornton School of Music at the University of Southern California. He is also formerly the Chairman of the Music Synthesis Department and piano faculty at The Berklee College of Music in Boston. He was a Teaching Fellow at the MIT (Cambridge) Center for Advanced Visual Studies and taught on the summer faculty at the Utrecht-HKU Conservatory in the Netherlands and improvisation master classes at the Hochschule fur Musik (Freiburg, Germany). A classical and jazz pianist and keyboard synthesist, he was a student of Adele Marcus, Stewart Gordon and Vasant Rai. He completed advanced graduate study at Columbia University, NYC and was a studio musician in New York City for 10 years.

Dennis Thurmond is a composer for Alfred Publishing in California and The Forest of Music Press in Taipei/Shanghai. He has presented many master classes and performances at events including the World Pedagogy Conference in Slovenia, A New Era in Keyboard Instruction with Robert Pace, and has presented at the Acoustic Society of America, “Acoustic and Electronic Instruments in Improvisation: A Keyboard Performance Perspective”, “Developing Improvisation Skills with the Aid of Music Sequencing Software” and for The Art of the Piano, at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music. During 2017 and 2018, he completed a 30 city concert tour of China for Yamaha China. He was a juror for the finals of the 2nd National Yamaha China Electronic Keyboard Competition, and was invited to perform and lecture at the Belt and Road International Music Seminar on the Art of Improvisation held at the Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, China. He continues to tour Asia, Europe and USA and was a studio musician for many years in NYC where he was keyboardist/arranger for the New York Vocal Ensemble.

His compositions include:

The Jazz SophistiCAT (4 volumes)
Music Thru MIDI (4 volumes)
A Systemic Approach for the Classical Pianist
TaiChi of Improvisation
The Beginning Modern Pianist (5 volumes..in /EnglishChinese)
The Twelve Studies (Chinese) Music+Math=Melodic Improvisational Patterns (in progress)