Biography

Catherine Lemay has been teaching piano privately in the Ottawa sector for over 10 years.  She is also part of a chamber music ensemble in which she performs both the cello and the piano.

Catherine’s music education background includes over 20 years of private piano lessons and music theory lessons as well as a Bachelor of Music (specializing in piano performance) and a Master of Arts (specializing in piano pedagogy), both from the University of Ottawa, in Ottawa, Ontario.  During her Bachelor of music, Catherine studied with reknowned piano teachers, among them Stéphane Lemelin and Jean Desmarais.  Over the course of her graduate studies, Catherine was an active contributor to research being undertaken in the Piano Pedagogy Research Laboratory at the University of Ottawa.  Throughout her involvement with the Piano Pedagogy Research Laboratory she collaborated in many multidisciplinary research projects, including her M.A. dissertation Sight-reading for Piano Students: Comparing Three Methods of Assessment.  She contributed to the research and writing of Piano Pedagogy: A Research and Information Guide, a reference book published by Routledge.  She also presented her work on various research projects at both national and international conferences on music education research.

Through her many years of piano lessons and her involvement with the Piano Pedagogy Research Laboratory, Catherine aspires to bridge traditional music teaching techniques with cutting edge research in her own teaching.