Lenny Young

About Lenny

Lenny Young is a performer, an improvisor, a teacher, and a scholar. His current teaching assignments are Artist Lecturer in Solfege at Carnegie Mellon University, Adjunct Professor of Eurhythmics at Duquesne University (working with both performance and music education majors), and adjunct teacher of solfege, eurhythmics and oboe at the Pittsburgh Creative and Performing Arts School (CAPA 6-12). He also conducts and arranges music for CAPA Antithesis, one of the only high-school new-music ensembles in the country.

Since 2013, Young has been the Administrative Coordinator of the Marta Sanchez Dalcroze Training Center at Carnegie Mellon. In this role he helps organize and produce their yearly Winter Workshop for music educators and Summer Dalcroze Workshops for musicians and teachers wishing to pursue Dalcroze certification.

As an oboist, he has played in classical and jazz contexts in orchestral and chamber music settings throughout southwestern PA and eastern Ohio. As principal oboist of the Altoona Symphony, he has performed three solo concertos with the orchestra. He has taught oboe students at Carnegie Mellon, Chatham University, Seton Hill University, and Indiana University of Pennsylvania. He was named Choir Director at Third Presbyterian Church in 2017; in addition to singing there, Young has sung professionally with the Pittsburgh Camerata, Pittsburgh Opera, Mendelssohn Choir of Pittsburgh, and Pittsburgh Festival Opera.

In Dalcroze teaching, the body is considered the first instrument. My goal is to help my students embody the same rhythms and phrases they perform with their instruments, to feel a mastery of the vocabulary of rhythm and meter, to understand how musicians can work together in a profound way, and to experience the joy of improvisation that flows from that mastery and understanding.