Spanish keyboard aficionado to perform on campus Friday

Skyrm has appeared as a piano soloist and collaborative artist throughout the U.S. and Europe. She combines performing the standard piano repertoire with research interests in early keyboards and Spanish and Latin American keyboard music.

Her performances have been broadcast nationally on public radio and on public access television. She recorded a CD of Spanish and Portuguese keyboard music of the eighteenth century on the National Music Museum’s rare Antunes fortepiano.

She has given presentations for the Music Teachers National Association, the European Piano Teachers Association, the American Musical Instrument Society, the Diego Fernandez International Festival of Spanish Keyboard Music and others on Spanish and Latin American keyboard music.

Her latest publication, “Anthology of Eighteenth-Century Spanish Keyboard Music,” was released by Wayne Leupold Editions in July 2010.

In 2006 she was named the first recipient of the University of South Dakota’s College of Fine Arts Biennial Distinguished Professor Award. She teaches studio and class piano and piano literature at the University of South Dakota, where she has been on the faculty since 1988.

She studied with master teacher Ilonka Deckers-Küszler in Milan, Italy, for a number of years. Other teachers include Fern Nolte Davidson, Larry Graham, and Ray Dudley, piano; Malcolm Bilson, fortepiano; and Bernard Brauchli, clavichord.

Skyrm holds degrees in piano performance from the College of Idaho, the University of Cincinnati, and the University of Colorado at Boulder. She was a prize winner in the Mason and Hamlin Idaho state auditions and the regional auditions and the recipient of an award from the Cincinnati Three Arts Foundation.