Eva Branda

I am a piano teacher at the Laurier Academy for Music and Arts (LAMA) and a sessional instructor in music history at Wilfrid Laurier University. I have taught piano for many years at a range of levels, and I have prepared students both for RCM examinations and piano competitions, particularly the Davenport Festival of Music in Toronto and the KW Kiwanis Music Festival. My own piano teachers have included Kent McWilliams and Maria Dolnycky (with whom I studied before university) and the late Andrew Markow (with whom I studied while pursuing a Bachelor of Music degree).

I hold an ARCT in piano performance from the Royal Conservatory of Music and a PhD in musicology from the University of Toronto. With special attention to Dvořák, my musicological research deals primarily with issues of reception and genre in the late nineteenth century and investigates the impact of politics on the musical life of Prague. My work has appeared in the Journal of the Royal Musical Association, Music & Letters, Nineteenth-Century Music Review, the Cambridge Opera Journal, and Acta Musicologica. I also recently contributed a chapter on Dvořák’s Dumky Piano Trio to the book Chamber Music in Europe (1850-1918): Composition, Mediation, and Reception (2024) and my chapter on the nineteenth-century Czech symphony will appear in The Cambridge History of Music in the Czech Lands (forthcoming).

Even though music history has become my focus, I have always sought to be a well-rounded musician and to continue developing as a pianist/performer. Also, my work as a music historian informs my approach to teaching piano, as I aim to contextualize the music with my students, by discussing the historical backdrop and style of a given piece. My goal is to help the students not just become skilled pianists, but also thoughtful, versatile musicians with a deep knowledge of and appreciation for the works they are playing.