About Ian
Hi! I’m Ian Campbell.
I’m a pianist, composer, improviser, conductor, and music educator based in Winnipeg, Manitoba.
I love making music, figuring out how music works, and helping other people discover the things they can do with it. My work as a teacher grows out of my own life as a musician: playing repertoire, improvising, composing, collaborating with other musicians, and continually learning.
I believe that everyone has the capacity to make music creatively, and that learning an instrument can be about much more than learning to play the right notes.
My Teaching Philosophy
I want my students to become musicians—not simply people who can play piano pieces.
That means developing performance skills alongside the ability to listen, understand, improvise, create, and make musical choices independently. Reading music is important, but it is one part of a much larger musical language.
My teaching is student-centered and personalized. Every student comes to the piano with different interests, experiences, strengths, and goals, and lessons should respond to the individual rather than asking every student to follow exactly the same path.
My teaching is strongly influenced by Music Learning Theory and by historical approaches to learning harmony and improvisation. Both have reinforced something I believe deeply: we learn music by making music. Sound, listening, movement, experimentation, imitation, improvisation, and understanding all have a place alongside notation and repertoire.
Ultimately, I want students to develop the independence and confidence to keep making music throughout their lives—whatever that comes to mean for them.
Education & Experience
I hold a Master of Music and a Bachelor of Musicd from the University of Manitoba.
My musical education has included extensive study in piano, composition, theory, improvisation, and conducting.
I continued my studies in Paris through the European American Musical Alliance at La Schola Cantorum.
My teaching has continued to evolve through my study of Music Learning Theory, partimento, improvisation, historical music pedagogy, and the ways musicians have learned to understand and create music across different traditions.
Alongside my private teaching, I founded Partimenti Workshop, through which I teach musicians how historical approaches to harmony, improvisation, and composition can become practical tools for making music at the keyboard.
My Work as a Musician
Teaching is one part of a larger musical life for me.
I work as a pianist, composer, improviser, and conductor, with a particular interest in the relationship between performance and creativity. I’m fascinated by the ways musicians of the past learned to improvise and compose, and by what those traditions can offer musicians today.
As a composer, I have written music for choir, piano, and instrumental ensembles. My work has been performed by ensembles including the Winnipeg Singers and Winnipeg Upper Voices, and has included music commissioned and supported by arts organizations and grants.
I’m currently working on my first album, a collection of new choral and piano works. The project brings together my work as a composer, pianist, and conductor, and explores the relationship between the human and natural worlds.
As a pianist and improviser, I’m interested in the keyboard as a place for exploration as well as performance: somewhere to play repertoire, discover harmony, improvise, accompany, compose, and simply follow an interesting musical idea.
Those different parts of my musical life continually feed back into my teaching. I teach creativity because I practise creativity myself. I want students to experience the piano not only as an instrument on which they learn other people’s music, but as a place where they can discover music of their own.