Rose McCathran (she/her)  BM, MM, NCTM

Pianist Rose McCathran is a teacher, lecturer, adjudicator, and performer who loves sharing her passion of music. She serves as a solo and collaborative artist and has given performances in the United States and Europe. Dedicated to teaching, she runs McCathran Piano Studio; a studio consisting of thirty-five students widely ranging in ages and levels. Her piano students have performed beautifully in studio recitals, won composition competitions, successfully fulfilled musicianship examinations, given full-length solo piano recitals, and enthusiastically participated in high level piano competitions and festivals, some of which have awarded her students solo and ensemble piano performances at Weill Recital Hall of Carnegie Hall in New York, at The Academy of Music of the Kimmel Center in Philadelphia, and at the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies at Columbia University. While several of her intermediate and advanced students have continued to study piano professionally in college as majors, minors, and participants in ensembles, all of her students have continued to enjoy and love music. 

Rose has presented lectures and lecture recitals to undergraduate music majors at Harvard University, to graduate students at Westminster Choir College, to adult students at Westminster Conservatory of Music, and to open audiences in and around Princeton, New Jersey. Most recently, she presented "Celebrating Female Composers of African Heritage in Western Classical Music", which featured the works of Florence Price, Nora Holt, Eva Jessye, Shirley Graham Du Bois, Julia Perry, Evelyn Simpson-Curenton, and Nkeiru Okoye. 

With a great interest for science and medicine, Rose recently performed music of Mozart at a neuroscience lecture in New York City, where listening to Mozart's music was being discussed as a successful therapy treatment for epilepsy. 

In demand as a piano adjudicator and clinician, Rose has served on the panels for The Greater Princeton Steinway Society, The Delaware Valley Music Club, and The New Jersey Music Teachers Association. A chorister as well, Rose has performed in the Westminster Choir and the Westminster Symphonic Choir at Carnegie Hall, the Lincoln Center, the New Jersey Performing Arts Center, and the Kimmel Center with the world’s leading orchestras and conductors. 

Rose holds a Master of Music degree and a Bachelor of Music degree in Piano Performance and Pedagogy from Westminster Choir College of Rider University, where she studied under internationally renowned teacher and pianist Ingrid Clarfield. Rose is a Nationally Certified Teacher of Music (NCTM) and has served on the distinguished faculty of the Westminster Choir College Piano Pedagogy Certificate Program, where she taught courses in piano technique. She also served as a member of the Artist Piano Faculty at the Westminster Conservatory in Princeton, New Jersey. Rose was honored as the recipient of the 2020 Top Teacher Award from Steinway & Sons. In 2021, she joined the Virtual Music Cohort at Shanti Bhavan School in India. 

Rose resides in Lawrenceville, New Jersey with her husband, composer, teacher, and pianist Ryan Brechmacher (ASCAP), and their beautiful sons, Mason and Liam.