Piano Students
Win Top Awards at
National Competition

Professor of Music
Piano

Dr. Jerry Alan Bush, pianist, is Professor of Music and Head of the Piano Faculty at the University of South Alabama in Mobile, Alabama, where he teaches piano performance and literature. In addition, Dr. Bush maintains an extensive career as a recitalist, master clinician and adjudicator for numerous competitive events. He is an honor graduate of the University of Alabama, University of Mississippi and Florida State University. Both Dr. Bush and his students have been the recipients of hundreds of awards and honors since his appointment to the University’s music faculty in 1971.

The winner of nine piano competitions and a member of numerous musical and academic honor societies, Dr. Bush has performed in a multiplicity of venues—including such prestigious locales as

Carnegie Hall in New York and the Library of Congress in Washington. In 2006-2007 he appeared at both the Academy of Music in Philadelphia and the Jones Performing Arts Center in Houston; and the current 2007-2008 season has featured engagements at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, a return to New York’s Carnegie Hall and an additional performance at the Aaron Copland School of Music of Queens College. In addition to hundreds of recital appearances, he has conducted some 300 master classes for teachers and advanced piano students and has judged keyboard competitions on more than 200 occasions. Dr. Bush is currently Master Clinician of both the New Orleans Performance Institute and the Atlanta

Keyboard Arts Forum. To date his students have accumulated 720 awards and honors in competitive events and have won graduate assistantships and fellowships at institutions throughout the nation.

In 1982 Dr. Bush was presented the first Master Teacher Certificate ever awarded by the Music Teachers National Association in recognition of his accomplishments in performance and pedagogy. At the University of South Alabama he was named Dean’s Lecturer in 1986 and Outstanding Professor of the entire institution in 1989. In recent years his concerts frequently have included works specifically written for him by Owen Middleton and David Durant, both noted composers of the Southern region and distinguished faculty members at the University of South Alabama.

A native of Tupelo, Mississippi, Dr. Bush completed his preparatory piano study with Katherine Finley Otto and attained his undergraduate and graduate degrees with major professors Roy McAllister, Edward Kilenyi, and Desmond Kincaid. He has worked on the post-doctoral level with some of the world’s leading artists—including Jorge Bolet, Leon Fleisher, Adele Marcus, Karen Shaw, Ruth Slenczynska, Etsko Tazaki and Beveridge Webster—representing such institutions as The Juilliard School in New York, the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, The Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia and the Indiana University School of Music. In recent years Dr. Bush has expanded his work to include performance kinesthetics and has appeared at the World Piano Conference and at both the Taubman and Golandsky Piano Institutes, most recently at Princeton University. His current study is in New York with John Bloomfield, faculty chairman of the Golandsky Institute.

Shown are USA winners in the 2008 DeBose National Piano Competition from the USA studio of Dr. Jerry Alan Bush. This is the first year in the history of the competition that all college division first-place winners have represented the same studio and institution. From front to rear: Gretter Diaz-Suarez (first prize, juniors), Aaron Bearden (first prize, sophomores), Abate Desta (second prize, juniors), Zachery Fellman (first prize, seniors) and Benjamin Rollings (first prize, freshmen). The success of these students brings the number of DeBose prize winners from Dr. Bush’s USA studio to 61 since 1995. The competition is held annually in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.