Ouachita Stories

Ouachita Baptist University’s Division of Music will host its annual Virginia Queen Piano Competition Friday, May 4, at 3 p.m. The competition will be held in Ouachita’s McBeth Recital Hall, and admission is free and open to the public.

The competition’s namesake, Virginia Queen, is a former professor of music at Ouachita who established the competition over four decades ago. Queen graduated from Ouachita in 1944 with Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Music degrees. She earned her Master of Music from the American Conservatory of Music in Chicago. Queen began teaching at Ouachita in 1946 and taught for 40 years before retiring.

Every participant in the annual competition is a piano major or minor, and they will each play two pieces with contrasting styles. This year’s participants include Elizabeth Anderson, a senior music education major from Salem, Ark.; Sean Carney, a music and Spanish double major from Little Rock, Ark.; Carli Copell, a freshman psychology major from Canton, Texas; Isabel Dodds, a senior piano major from Leslie, Ark.; Felicity Johnson, a Biblical languages major from Little Rock, Ark.; Melissa Lee, a freshman worship arts major from Singapore; Zhanxiu Lu, a senior music and studio art double major from Shaoxing, China; and Tyler Sanders, a senior music industry major from Arkadelphia, Ark.

For more information, contact Dr. Lei Cai at [email protected] or (870) 245-5140.

 

By Katie Smith

April 30, 2018