Interview: Valerie Capers - Entrada

July 1, 2021

Interview: Valerie Capers

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Entrada is excited to share Fred Karpoff’s scintillating interview with Valerie Capers. Learn about Dr. Capers’s rich musical life, the inspiration behind Portraits in Jazz, and some ways that race and blindness have impacted her career.

Valerie Capers is an African-American pianist and composer, and the first blind graduate of The Juilliard School. Her Portraits in Jazz capture twelve different jazz styles in highly appealing pieces for intermediate pianists, and were inspired by her own fond memories of studying works by Bach, Schumann, Tchaikovsky, and Prokofiev that are of similar length and difficulty.

The Portraits are experiencing a surge of interest with teachers and students and appear destined to take their place in the intermediate repertoire beside those works by long-established composers.

Learn more about Fred’s Masterclasses on Capers’s works. 

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