Matthew Loudermilk was Young Texas Artists’ 2008 Gold Medalist in Piano. He recently shared an update on his career with us.
How would you say your experience with YTA impacted you and your music career?
Well, it was a wonderful experience. It’s always delightful to win first — It’s a big encouragement. There’s a lot of work that goes into practicing and preparing for every single performance, and it’s nice to get recognized. It validated that all of that work was aimed at something worthwhile.
And of course, the reward of giving a performance is special. In college, you want people to hear you play, and it’s kind of hard to get audiences to listen. You play for your teacher; you play for juries. These are like exams. There are a lot of required performances. But fundamentally, you want to play for an audience, because that’s your goal as a performer.
What have you been up to since then?
By 2008, I had already married my wife, Katarina. She’s also a pianist. Just before the competition, we had started a music school here in Houston. Since that time, our school has continued to flourish. We both teach, and we have about 16 teachers who work in the school as well. We have a permanent location now. We have recitals at Rice University, and our students have won competitions throughout Texas, nationally, and internationally. That’s been wonderful, to start raising the next generation.
What have been some of the more memorable moments of your music career so far?
One highlight is when we took some students and toured China in 2015. My wife and I gave performances and taught master classes there. Two of our students who were national prize winners also got to perform there. That was special.
We’ve done several student exchange programs with a music school in Moscow, Russia. (Of course, since the war that’s been curtailed four times.) Between 2007 and 2019, we took students, and they performed in Russia and met Russian students. They had a nice cultural exchange and took lessons with their Russian teacher at the site.
We also started a nonprofit, which provides funding for some students to attend master classes or events that they wouldn’t otherwise be able to do, and that’s satisfying as well.
So those are some of the highlights, but the school has done really well. Our students have continued to flourish, and some have become music majors.
What are your goals from here?
I would say that most of my current professional goals involve what my students do. My mom was a piano teacher. She taught me, and I’ve been teaching piano since age 13. So, for 30 years, I’ve been teaching piano, and it’s something I’ve enjoyed doing from the time I was very young. It brings me a tremendous amount of satisfaction to share my experience and joy and understanding of music with others.
Working with pre-college students is especially rewarding because I get to work with them for many years. A typical college teacher will work with students for two or four years. But I have many kids that I’ve taught for 10 or 12 years. I get to see them grow up. I’d like to believe I’m having a profound influence on their life and their relationship with and understanding of music.
I find that personally satisfying, and I also think it’s something that our culture, desperately needs. You know, if somebody majored in computer science, they’d have to be a good math student and a generally a good student, and then they go to college and start learning about computer science. But with music, they have to get to college and already be highly accomplished and well-trained on their instrument. If they haven’t done that, unfortunately, it’s too late for the vast majority of them. We have a desperate need in our culture, in our society, for students to receive really top-notch musical education.
Of course, most of them won’t go on to become professional musicians. But they also learn about classical music and experience it in a special way, which hopefully translates into a lifelong appreciation of this art, as well as becoming concertgoers in their grown-up life.
To circle back to your question, what I’d like to accomplish is continuing to attract top-notch students who go on to have careers in music. I’m most interested in teaching students who are highly dedicated, who are practicing a lot, who are entering competitions.
Please tell us what you enjoy doing for fun or to relax. Do you have any hobbies?
Yes, I like to read. I like films. And the thing I recently got into as an adult is mountain climbing. I climbed I believe seven 14,000-foot peaks in Colorado, and I hope to continue building on that. I went on an overnight expedition in Italy and climbed Monte Rosa two years ago, and that was really fun. I got to climb on glaciers and see the sunrise. You’re roped up and avoiding crevices and all this stuff. I would say that’s my grown-up hobby.
Please tell us about your musical tastes. Have they changed over the years? How?
I would say that I’ve loved classical music probably since age 8. I remember falling in love with “Pachelbel’s Canon.” Classical musicians turn their noses up at it today because it’s very overplayed, but I remember figuring out that it’s just an incredibly beautiful piece of music when I was 8, and I’ve sort of grown with classical music ever since. I think it’s a pretty amazing art form.
Within that realm, what I’m into at various times shifts. In recent years, Bach has really established himself as my favorite composer, even though he’s a composer that I find very challenging to perform and not often loved by audiences the way Liszt or Chopin tend to be appreciated. I’m very drawn to that.
And sure, I’ll get into something else, depending on what I’m working on at the time. The nice thing is there’s such a wide variety of composers and of instrument groupings. I’ve been going to the opera a lot more recently, which is something I never did before. That’s been wonderful, not only to enjoy the operas, but it informs your understanding of music. Mozart was obviously a big opera composer, and when you listen to his operas it gives you new insight into his piano concertos or even sonatas and vocal melody construction and how it relates to singing. It’s been really fun.
What advice would you offer young artists who are just starting their music careers?
What I would say a lot of them need to do, and certainly I should have done better when I was that age, is they need to have a very good publicity presence. They should take the time and spend the money to do professional publicity photos. They should spend the time and the money to make professional recordings. I realize that’s a lot of effort at a time when people might wonder if it’s really worth it, but you need to have excellent recordings that you can use to promote yourself. And then, developing an online presence on YouTube certainly is really important today, but to do that, you want to have good recordings that show you at your best. Spending the time and the effort is really worthwhile.
And then finding a unique skill, a unique interest that they can develop, it could be a certain composer that they’re into, that’s lesser known. Anything that makes them special and can stand out because it’s a very crowded field. It’s also crowded with people who don’t perform anymore because we still have their recordings. You need to find something that you can do that’s special and then work very hard on it and promote it a lot.
Finally, people have to be pretty creative to have a career in music. You can’t just say, ‘Well, I’ve got a doctorate, and I will try to get a job.’ Obviously, not everyone can do that. When we started International Music Academy in 2005, there weren’t a lot of music schools around. And a lot of them were run like businesses rather than arts institutions, which is what we’re trying to do. That gave my wife and I, who are both pianists, a really good job and a really special calling in a field that’s pretty crowded. So, you have to do something out of the box and do it wholeheartedly.