Nicole DiPaolo

Praised as a “sensitive pianist” and “outstanding accompanist” who delivers “powerful interpretations,” Nicole Elyse DiPaolo enjoys a multifaceted career as a sought-after collaborative pianist, educational composer, arranger, coach, private teacher, and adjunct music professor. Currently based in the Cleveland area, Ms. DiPaolo has appeared as a concerto soloist with the Ambassador Chamber Players on multiple occasions (two of which also featured her own Piano Trio in C minor) and as a recitalist, collaborator, and presenter worldwide. She holds a B.Mus in Music Theory from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, where she studied piano under Michele Cooker and Louis Nagel; additionally, she studied composition with Bright Sheng and basso continuo (harpsichord accompaniment) with Edward Parmentier. Ms. DiPaolo also holds an MM in Music Theory from Indiana University-Bloomington, where she has achieved PhD candidacy in the same field. To further her vocal coaching skills, she has taken additional French and German diction courses with Prof. Gary Arvin.

In June 2018, Ms. DiPaolo was a Collaborative Piano Fellow at the Bay View Music Festival in Petoskey, Michigan, performing with the festival’s SOARS voice program participants on fully staged opera scenes and art song recitals as well as in the Bay View Young Artist Series (Charlevoix, MI). She recently joined the Spooky Goose Opera team as an online coach/pianist for their Quarantine Concert Series, the world’s first livestreamed Zoom production of Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte (summer 2020), and new opera projects under development.

Recent performing highlights include giving the world premiere of H. Leslie Adams’ Grand March for trumpet and piano in the composer’s presence; solo appearances with Sing for Hope’s Healing Arts Initiative, presenting a curated program entitled “The Singing Piano” (May and June 2021); solo recitals in Beachwood and Sheffield Village, OH, and a virtual appearance in the 2021 Classical Singer vocal performance competition. Other notable engagements include the 2020 Spooky Goose Opera Quarantine Concert Series (5 concerts to date); the 2018 Evansville Philharmonic Young Artist Competition; the 2016, 2017, and 2019 National Society of Arts and Letters Vocal Competitions (multiple entrants); the “Opera Night at North” benefit concert with students of IU’s top-ranked opera program (among them “Accidental Tenor” Andrew Lunsford); and two long-term, international cruise ship performing contracts with violinist Amy Lee as the Duo del Mare. Additionally, she recently finished recording an album of unique folksong settings with bass-baritone and IU Kelley School of Business professor Timothy Fort, which is included in his new business ethics text, Vision of the Firm. Among other previous engagements at IU, she was the rehearsal pianist/coach for a summer production of John Frederick Lampe’s little-known Baroque opera Pyramus and Thisbe.

Ms. DiPaolo began formal music study at age 5 in the Detroit area, and within two years she had already won prizes in area Federation and National Piano Guild competitions. At age 10 she enrolled in the University of Michigan’s preparatory piano program, and she performed her first full solo recital at age 11 in Westland, Michigan; additionally, she spent three summer sessions at the All-State Piano Program at Interlochen, where she won awards in music theory and piano literature.

Ms. DiPaolo continues to perform throughout the Midwest while maintaining a private online studio, continuing a teaching lineage that can be traced through Bela Bartok (a great-grand-instructor) to Franz Liszt and Beethoven. Her principal teachers have included Michele Cooker, Louis Nagel, Joanne Smith, and Alan Huckleberry; she has also had the pleasure of undertaking additional coaching with Menahem Pressler, Waleed Howrani, Christopher Harding, Donald Morelock, Philip Bush, John Ellis, and the late Eugene Bossart. Ms. DiPaolo has undertaken more recent piano pedagogy studies with Russian approach expert Irina Gorin, the author of the Tales of a Musical Journey piano method, and is Level 1 and Level 2 certified in Tales.

When not on the piano bench, Ms. DiPaolo continues to compose and arrange, and her compositions have been described as “very effective” with a “fantastic amount of intrigue,” “mindfulness…[and] colorful nuance” (Seven Sky Music). She earned a doctoral minor in composition from IU, where she studied with Claude Baker, Don Freund, P. Q. Phan, and David Schneider. Ms. DiPaolo’s music has been heard across the world. Along with numerous performances in the Midwest, her commissioned song settings of Muscogee poet laureate Alexander Posey’s texts have been performed nationwide, and the Smithsonian Institution procured copies of two of these (Nature’s Blessings and A Vision) to archive at the National Museum of the American Indian. Ms. DiPaolo’s music also received its Mexican premiere in 2013 with a performance of her Divertimento, written for the International String Quartet of Yucatán. In 2014 Ms. DiPaolo published a set of twenty short pedagogical pieces in uncommon keys, entitled Venturing Beyond, for early-intermediate pianists of all ages, available on SheetMusicPlus and MusicaNeo, and she is currently working on Vignettes, a new set of pedagogical pieces that will introduce intermediate pianists to the Impressionist language of Maurice Ravel. Most recently, Ms. DiPaolo was commissioned to create a choral arrangement of “Ride,” the city of Bloomington’s official bicentennial song, for the Bloomington Community Song Project. Also a sought-after composition teacher and adjudicator, Ms. DiPaolo frequently judges state, regional, and divisional MTNA composition competitions at all levels, ranging from elementary to college-level Young Artists.