Description
Dr. Kyle Adam Blair has been teaching beginner-to-collegiate level pianists and coaching singers in the San Diego area since 2011. He has served as the Staff Pianist for the UC San Diego Department of Music since 2018 as well as been a Lecturer (vocal coach) in the UCSD Department of Theatre & Dance since 2020.
Within the Villa Musica community, Dr. Kyle currently teaches piano on Fridays and Saturdays. His piano students have won prizes in local and national competitions, and frequently score high marks in Royal Conservatory of Music examinations. He has performed numerous #LiveAtTheVilla recitals, co-directed Project Cabaret, and accompanied community ensembles as well as student RCM exams.
Dr. Kyle’s solo pianistic interests lie in lyricism, complexity, and dissonance. His major focuses are on the creation of new works in collaboration with composers, and the performance of the American piano repertoire of the 20th and 21st centuries, particularly the music of Aaron Copland, Charles Ives, Elliott Carter, and Stuart Saunders Smith.
Outside of his frequent engagements as a solo and collaborative pianist in southern California, Dr. Kyle’s most memorable performances include world premieres of Bruno Ruviaro’s twelve Pos-Tudos piano etudes in San Francisco and Santa Clara, the premiere of Stuart Saunders Smith’s Family Portraits: Sylvia at 70 at the Hartt School of Music, and concerts with Bang-On-A-Can All-Stars performing music of Steve Reich in Seattle and Los Angeles.
His curiosities regarding song and theatre spark frequent collaborations with actors, singers, and dancers. Most recently, he has worked closely with Grammy-winning soprano Susan Narucki as the repetiteur and vocal coach for the kallisti ensemble, contributing to performances of Kurt Weill’s The Threepenny Opera, Tom Johnson’s The Four-Note Opera, and premieres of Lei Liang’s Inheritance and Stephen Lewis’s Noon at Dusk.
Dr. Kyle received his Doctor of Musical Arts degree in Contemporary Music Performance (piano) from UC San Diego in 2018, under the tutelage of Aleck Karis. He can be heard on New World Records and Edgetone Records (available on all music-streaming platforms), and has also produced for two of Aleck Karis’s releases on Bridge Records.
