About Rebecca Shockley

 

Becky grew up in a musical family in Cincinnati. She studied piano under her mother until she entered Indiana University, studying with Joseph Battista and Sidney Foster. She earned Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in performance, and taught music theory as a TA for six semesters, then spent a year in London, where she earned a Performer’s Licentiate at the Royal Academy of Music and met her future husband, John Shockley. After several years as an independent teacher, she began a Doctorate at the University of Colorado under Guy Duckworth.

 

In 1978 she was hired at Eastern Kentucky University to teach studio piano, class piano, and pedagogy. She performed solo recitals throughout the Midwest, and performed concertos with several university orchestras and the Columbia (S.C.) Philharmonic Orchestra. In 1986 she joined the University of Minnesota faculty to teach class piano, keyboard harmony, and pedagogy until her retirement in 2014.

 

Becky has given workshops on mapping, practice strategies, and other pedagogical topics throughout the U.S. and in England, Canada, Greece, Taiwan, China, and Korea. She served on the Advisory Board and as clinician for Piano Discoveries, gave clinics for the Celebration Series, and chaired the MTNA Pedagogy Saturday Committee and the Committee on Learning Theory for the National Conference on Piano Pedagogy. Her articles and reviews have appeared in the major music journals, and her book, Mapping Music, is widely used by piano teachers today.