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PETER GACH - Biography August 2000 marked the 20th
anniversary of Peter Gach’s appointment to the music faculty at PALOMAR
COLLEGE. It also marks the 20th
year of his performances at the college.
During that time he has performed several hundred concerts, and
touched the hearts of many, many people. Gach functions as both a teacher
and an artist in the Performing Arts Department.
His dual roles are mutually supportive and complimentary: his artistry supports his teaching, and his
teaching fulfills his artistic vision and imparts it to students. Gach’s teaching activities
have ranged from beginning classes for non-musicians who are just starting
to read music as they learn to play the piano, to classes for music
majors who are honing their performing skills in order to prepare for
public appearances. His recently
completed monograph Practice Makes Perfect:
A Handbook for Musicians at Work details his methods of practicing,
and has met with great success among students of music. (It is available in the Palomar College Bookstore.) Gach’s performing repertoire over the years has spanned a wide gamut of musical styles and activities. He plays the “classics” - Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert, Schumann, Chopin and Liszt as well as contemporary works. Because of his Polish heritage, he feels a special affinity for Chopin. He holds a degree in Slavic languages, which enabled him to study at the Warsaw Conservatory in Warsaw, Poland (the same conservatory Chopin attended.) Fluent in Polish, he frequently returns there to perform. He has performed all but
one of the Beethoven piano concerti with the Palomar College Orchestra
in addition to two world premiers and numerous other concerti. He also enjoys giving lecture-recitals explaining the details
of the music he has programmed. Gach
firmly believes that we honor the legacy of the great musicians of the
past by performing music written by composers living now. Over the past twenty years he has performed
many worlds premiers of works written specifically for him. Jim Weld
(of the Palomar College faculty,) Norm Weston, William Bradbury, Francois
Rose, Rafal Stradomski, and Madelyn Byrne are just a few of the composers
whose works he has championed and premiered. Other composers of the 20th
century also interest Gach. He
is one of the few pianists to perform the Charles Ives First Sonata,
a work of enormous scope and difficulty.
He is also interested in the piano music of Karol Szymanowski,
an early 20th century Polish composer. In 1998 he was invited by the Karol Szymanowski Society to perform
at the composer’s home in Zakopane, Poland. Improvisation is another area of musical development for Gach. Over the years, he has developed his own unique improvisational style, rooted in the classical tradition, yet exploring the boundaries of musical expression. He has done a series of concerts with the Palomar College Contemporary Dance Ensemble where he improvised music on various keyboard instruments to the movements of the dancers. He has also used this improvisational technique with the Palomar College Contemporary Theatre Ensemble. This involvement led to the co-creation, with theatre faculty professor Michael Mufson of the enthusiastically received performance piece Wireless City in which Gach created a sound track and improvised on amplified piano. This season, Gach will perform
the entire Well-Tempered Clavier, Vol. II of Johann Sebastian Bach in a series of intimate concerts in the College’s
Boehm Gallery. In April of 2001
he released his recording of Scott Joplin Rags and Waltzes, at
a sold-out concert at the College. He returns to the Howard Brubeck
Theatre on the college campus in March to present “Peter Gach and Friends”
a concert featuring many of his musical collaborators.
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