NEPTA Speaker Series: Greg Presley

This workshop is interactive. I will be teaching simplified versions of the dance steps for Baroque Dances. Comfortable shoes and clothes are highly recommended. We encounter these dances in dance suites and individual pieces composed by Bach, Handel, Rameau, Couperin and even earlier pieces by the English clavecinists. I will present the history and origin of the dances and the standardized components of the Baroque Dance Suite, the importance of Louis XIV and court protocols, the central place that dance held in the lives of the nobility of Europe, and the lingering effects that these dances had on the development of the classical Sonata.

The performance of the steps is crucial to understanding the proper performance tempos of these dances, their qualities, their phrase structures, and their internal accents and stresses. I will also explore the many pieces of the late 18th and 19th centuries which incorporated these dances and expanded their expressive range, usually without referencing the dances by name. If technology cooperates, I will also show some curated videos of the dances being performed in costume which have been reconstructed from the 17th century historical dance notation called.Beauchamp-Feuillet Notation. I hope that by the end of the workshop, you’ll be able to answer the question in the title.

Mr. Presley, a graduate of Yale University and the Juilliard School, was a winner of the William Petschek scholarship as well as the competitive piano minor teaching fellowship at Juilliard. As a competition prize winner, he has appeared as soloist with the Spokane Symphony, the Washington-Idaho Symphony, and the Yale Symphony. He has also performed many concertos with the Spokane Opera Orchestra.

He made a career of working with modern dancers after graduation, first with the Martha Graham Company in New York, and then on the dance faculty of Florida State University. He has premiered a number of composers’ works written especially for dance, revived a great deal of 20th century music used for modern dance and was invited to showcase the piano works of Robert Muczynski at the Music Teacher National Convention in Miami in 1990.

As a composer himself, he has written many works for dance and solo piano. Since his return to Spokane, he has been active as a soloist and accompanist including work for several productions of the Spokane Opera.

He served as a member of the piano faculty in the Music department of Eastern Washington University in the spring of 2001 and has been a member of the piano faculty at Gonzaga University since the Fall of 2001. His students have been prize winners in state and local competitions and a number have gone on to have careers in music.

He performs regularly as the principal keyboard player for the Spokane Symphony, as a chamber musician and as part of two-piano duos. He played Beethoven’s own arrangement of the Grosse Fuga for 4 hands with Christopher O’Reilly in 2010, and accompanied Thomas Hampson for the 10th Anniversary Gala of the Fox Theater in Spokane. He accompanied Zuill Bailey in Michael Daugherty’s Grammy Award winning new piece, Tales of Hemingway, in December, 2017 and subsequent to that, has accompanied Zuill in many concerts in Spokane as part of the Connoisseur Concerts series.

He has presented at MTNA National Conferences in Spokane and Minneapolis, as well as numerous state conferences in the Northwest.

This first Speaker Series Event for New England Piano Teachers' Association is free for non-NEPTA members. Please register to attend in person or to receive a livestream link.