DETAILED

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Alissa is a French-American keyboardist, composer, and educator.  She began her musical studies on the piano, with Donaldo Garcia, at the Manhattan School of Music Preparatory Division, in New York. After undergraduate studies at at Vassar College, she came to Paris to study with Gérard Frémy and Guigla Katsarava at the Ecole Normale de Musique de Paris. 

 

As a Harriet Hale Woolley Foundation Fellow, she pursued her interest in instrument building and historical keyboards.  She first built a fretted clavichord, then a French double harpsichord, before studying the playing of these instruments with Olivier Baumont, Noëlle Spieth, and Frédéric Michel.  She then studied fortepiano (Malcolm Bilson, Bart van Oort, David Breitman) and the organ (Patrick Delabre, Marie-Louise Langlais, Jean-Luc Thellin). 

 

As a performer, her repertoire spans from early to contemporary music: she creates innovative programs (combining for example music and declamation) and seeking to promote little-known works.   In 2020 she completed a recording project using a Meerbach clavichord from 1799 conserved at Moravian College (Bethlehem, PA), and music notebooks from archives contemporary to the instrument.  In 2023, she received the Joan Benson Prize from Early Music America in recognition of her clavichord projects. 

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She has been an artist in residence at the Banff Center (Alberta, Canada) and at several festivals in France and North America (the Journees Lyriques, the Amherst Early Music Festival, the Boston Clavichord Society) where she performs as a soloist or in ensembles, on piano, harpsichord, clavichord, and organ.  She occasionally works with ensembles and companies (La Fenice, Opéra Fuoco, Compagnie du Fils du Grand Réseau, etc.) With cellist Jérôme Huille, she forms the Duo Dialogues which produced a recording retracing the history of celloand keyboard repertoire, as winners of the "Musique au Centre" competition.  She collaborates as an accompanist and chamber musician with numerous partners including the singer Emily Eagen, and the flutist Béatrice Bellocq.   Since 2023, Alissa has been an organist at the Chartres Cathedral.

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Her approach to keyboards, both organologically and culturally, inspires her as a composer: she devotes herself almost exclusively to this family of instruments.  She is particularly interested in the using each instruments' unique characteristics and 'flaws'. She seeks to explore the conventions of the classical concert through pieces intended to be heard in the dark, or by performing in atypical places (elevator).  Her Suite for Harpsichord was awarded a second prize at the SIMM Nuove Musiche per Clavicembalo competition (Milan, 2022), and her piece “Forager's Journal” for clavichord was awarded a Second Prize at the International Clavichord Composition Competition of the Nordic Historical Keyboard Festival .  In 2021, she was awarded the “Judith Lang Zaimont Prize” (International Alliance for Women in Music) for “Night Pieces” (piano).  His pieces have been performed at the CNSM in Paris during the "Journees de Clavecin en France", at the Amherst Early Music Festival (USA), and performed in recital in France and abroad. 

 

Alissa's creative work with young audiences is sponsored by the Departmental Council of Eure et Loir and the Center Region.  Passionate about the unifying power of music and its potential to convey values, she creates works in collaboration with primary and middle school children, around themes such as ecology or acceptance of others.   She is the author of a collection of educational pieces and music for dancing.

Alissa has developed an educational approach based on learning the 'common core' of keyboard technique from a very young age.  In collaboration with the pianoforte player Bart van Oort, she organizes an annual "Rencontre de Pianoforte" (course and concerts). As "Professeur d'Enseignement Artistique", she  teaches at the Conservatory of the Agglo du Pays de Dreux.