Our keyboard program offers an array of innovative courses and experiences for 21st century young artists, where they strive for and attain the highest artistic ideals while developing a unique musical voice and professional skill set. Situated within an enormous university with a fantastic variety of intellectual options, and within the beautiful and vibrant city of Madison, our keyboard students also find themselves part of an intimate and supportive community of musical peers, the high caliber of which will provide inspiration as well as encouragement. Our world-class faculty offers instruction and professional advice to students that is grounded not only in extensive real-world performance experience, but in the maintenance of the highest intellectual standards. In addition to personalized lesson time, students meet weekly with their professors and peers for studio classes in which they perform for each other, acquiring both experience on-stage and valuable feedback. Other performance opportunities are abundant: regular departmental recitals, annual competitions (several of which provide monetary prizes along with opportunities to perform before larger audiences), chamber concerts with outstanding peers from other instrumental areas, special marathon events (past examples include concerts where the students collaborated to perform the complete Mozart piano sonatas and the complete Chopin mazurkas), and of course senior recitals and required graduate-level performances. Opportunities to play for visiting musical luminaries in a master-class setting also arise regularly, in recent years, Leon Fleischer, Murray Perahia, Richard Goode, and Peter Takacs, among others, have inspired many of our students in this way.