Dr. Deon Nielsen Price: concert pianist, composer, music professor, mother of five

Born in Salt Lake City, Utah in 1934, Deon Nielsen was living at Fort Clayton in the Panama Canal Zone around 1946, when her father was stationed there. She was already a pianist and, at age 12, had her first paying job as a ballet school accompanist. She and her family regularly attended concerts at the National Theater. At one, she heard pianist Arthur Rubinstein, and at another, pianist Gyorgy Sandor. "I even slipped backstage during intermission for their autographs," she remembers. Those great pianists inspired her to become a concert pianist herself. Nearly 60 years later, in June 2005, Deon returned to Panama with her son, Dr. Berkeley Price, a clarinetist--this time to give a concert. "Returning to the site of my early ambition now completes a circle," she told the audience. Ironically, Gyorgy Sandor died later that year.

Deon attended high school in San Francisco, and took lessons from C.W. Reid at the San Francisco Academy of Music. She accompanied her high school choir, played in classical and pop programs in the community—including some with yet-to-be-famous Johnny Mathis and Howard Ruff—and worked as an accompanist in a vocal studio.

After high school, Deon moved to Provo, Utah to enter Brigham Young University, where she studied with Carl Fuerstner and graduated with a degree in piano performance and a Gold Medal Award for her piano playing.  She spent two years in Germany at the Academia Pro Arte, where her teacher, Erwin Schmieder, told her that he thought she had what it takes to be a concert artist. While at BYU, she married Kendall O. Price, the student body vice president.

Deon worked on her master’s degree at the University of Michigan School of Music with Benning Dexter, where she continued to accompany vocal studios, play piano duets, and collaborate with instrumentalists in degree recitals and community concerts. While there, she also studied composition with Leslie Bassett. She completed a post-doctoral study with Gyorgy Sandor on the piano works of Bela Bartok, during which time she and Sandor played all of Bartok’s works for two pianos.

After moving to Los Angeles in the late 1960s with her husband and their five children, Deon studied with Aube Tzerko, and then began a doctoral program in piano performance. She studied accompanying with Gwendolyn Koldofsky, piano with Brooks Smith, Malcolm Hamilton, Daniel Pollack, and piano and composition with Samuel Adler.

When she finished her doctorate, she began working at the University of California--Santa Barbara, giving lessons and teaching two required courses. She later taught at El Camino College, California State University--Northridge, University of Southern California, Los Angeles Harbor College, Mission College, Long Beach City College, and the Crossroads School of Arts and Sciences. Her book Accompanying Skills for Pianists, first published in 1991, was an outgrowth of her doctoral work. 

Deon has performed regularly at university and community concerts across the continental United States, as well as internationally at festivals under the auspices of Academia Pro Arte, the International Congresses on Women in Music, the National Association of Composers/USA, and the International Alliance for Women Composers. She has given presentations, masterclasses and workshops on accompanying and sightplaying at national and state conventions of the Music Teachers’ Association and the Mu Phi Epsilon International Fraternity, at chapter meetings throughout the western United States, and at universities all over the United States. She has been an adjudicator for many performer and composer competitions such as the Gina Bachauer Piano Competition and the Young Musicians Foundation.

Deon serves on the boards as president and past-president of the National Association of Composers, USA (NACUSA) and the International Alliance for Women in Music (IAWM). She has also served as an officer of Mu Phi Epsilon International Music Fraternity (MPE) and the International Congress on Women in Music (ICWM), and is a member of the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP). She has also operated her own music publishing company, Culver Crest Publications, for 35 years. In 2009, there was a fire in the warehouse, and Deon’s stock of publications went up in flames. She was able to reprint and rebuild most of her stock, but a few pieces were completely destroyed. Fortunately, her alma mater, Brigham Young University, and some other private collectors had many of Deon’s works and were able to give her copies of some pieces she no longer had.

Throughout her career, Deon has championed the causes of new music and women composers, in addition to performing mainstream music. Her concerts have showcased her own compositions, music by American composers, the alto and soprano saxophones as chamber music instruments, songs by African-American composers, Jascha Heifetz's transcriptions of light classics, piano and clarinet music (with her son Berkeley*), and normally-overlooked historical and contemporary women composers. To date, she has composed 96 works, made 54 arrangements, written 4 books, recorded 7 CDs, written several articles for music journals, and given hundreds of concerts. Her latest concert was in September 2017 in San Francisco, in which she collaborated with Darryl Taylor, countertenor, and Victoria Rodriguez, mezzo-soprano, to perform three of her song cycles, and piano music by Chopin and Debussy.

You can listen to some musical excerpts on the Culver Crest Publications Books & CDs page, at culvercrest.com.

Some of Deon's recordings also appear in Naxos Music Library and on YouTube when you use her name as a search term.

Much of the information for this biographical post appears on the Culver Crest Publications Bio page and in Deon's book Accompanying Skills for Pianists, 2nd edition, pages 195-202.

*On a side note: As I was doing research for this blog post, I saw a photo of Deon's son Berkeley and almost fell off my chair, because I played in the Wind Symphony at Brigham Young University with him in the early 1990s! -- Janice