Diane Luchese

Biography

Music theorist/organist Diane Luchese joined the Towson University music theory faculty in Fall 1999. Prior to Towson, she taught at the Ohio State University, Chicago Musical College, and the New England Conservatory. She also held positions as an organist/choir master in the New York, Boston, and Chicago metropolitan areas, and currently freelances as a church organist in the Baltimore area.

Among her special interests are counterpoint; pedagogy as informed by cognition research; rhythm, time and motion; and the music of Bach, Hildegard, Messiaen, and Ligeti. Accordingly, she has presented papers at numerous conferences, which include the First International Congress on Messiaen Studies, the Making Time in Music International Conference at Oxford University, the International Society of Hildegard von Bingen Studies, the International Congress on Medieval Studies, the Society for Music Theory, the Symposium on Music and Nature, and the Bridges International Conference. In 2010 she contributed a chapter to Olivier Messiaen: The Centenary Papers, published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Her articles have been published in Sonus and The American Organist. Luchese performs recitals throughout the northeast, and especially enjoys performing early and contemporary works. In 2009 she performed John Cage’s Organ2/ASLSP in a 15-hour uninterrupted performance at Towson University, and also performed slightly shorter realizations of this work in 2017 at Leeds Cathedral for the Performing Indeterminacy Conference, and in 2012 at the nief-norf Research Summit. Her recording, Light and Dark and In Between, released on the Raven CD label, features contemporary music played on organs in Baltimore.  In 2017 Luchese received a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award for classical performance.

Luchese earned a Ph.D. in music theory from Northwestern University, Master of Music degrees from the New England Conservatory in both music theory and organ performance, and a Bachelor of Music in organ from the Manhattan School of Music, where she was awarded the Bronson Ragan Memorial Award for Excellence in Organ. Her organ teachers include Yuko Hayashi and Frederick Swann. She also studied composition privately with M. William Karlins and Robert Cogan.