Piano Teacher
Ava B.
Ava started learning piano when she was seven years old. She continued pursuing her passion and goals in music until the university level. In her country, Iran, she did not have many chances to follow her passions and goals because women were not allowed to perform or sing in public easily in the city she grew up. Therefore, she moved to the U.S. to be able to study at university without any restrictions. She started studying at Bellevue College to take general requirements for the University of Washington. Then by getting help from Bellevue College and UW advisers, she was able to take the right steps and get accepted at UW by getting guidance from the UW piano faculty. Also, when she was at Bellevue college, she tried to connect with its faculty and was able to participate in the chamber concerts which occur each quarter in Carlson Theatre. After she was accepted at the University of Washington School of Music, Ava got the chance to study piano with Professor Cristina Valdes and participate in some piano master classes and ensemble concerts at Brechemin Auditorium Hall as a performer and an auditor. Besides her participation and performance at colleges, Ava has had some performances voluntarily at Baha’i Center and Persian Poetry and Music Workshop events at Bellevue Washington.
Ava has been working on the repertoire from baroque to contemporary such as Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Haydn, Chopin, Schoenberg, Prokofiev, etc. Her audiences have found that her music honors and maintains the great piano composers through the purity of life and human expression. A fellow musician maintained, “her careful articulation of Bach’s French suites demonstrate that music performance transcends music preservation”.
She hopes that through her music, audiences can be reminded of the love that connects otherwise disparate people. Therefore, by performing at Brechmin Auditorium and UW library, she has been fighting for women in Iran who are prevented from sharing their music in public. In addition to some performances in the US and Seattle, she experienced being on stage, performing Bach and Chopin pieces when she was in Iran privately.
Ava recently graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Washington School of Music. Since 2019, she started having lessons with well-known teachers such as Tamara Dolidze and Raphael Minaskanian who have helped her develop her teaching style and strategies. Ava’s teaching philosophy is training her students to maintain their creativity and independence in their musical ideas and interpretation of the songs to impact positively on their future musical path.