Nicholas Lockey

Nicholas Lockey is a Puget Sound native whose career has spanned music performance, research, composition, education, and arts administration.

As an educator, he has served on the faculty of Sam Houston State University and as a visiting faculty lecturer at Princeton University, teaching courses in music history, music appreciation, world music cultures, music performance, and interdisciplinary arts courses. He also spent six years as the Upper School Music Director for The Benjamin School (Palm Beach Gardens, FL), where he taught choir, band, orchestra, piano, and music theory. He continues sharing his passion for music by providing performance and education opportunities for local students through his current work as the Managing Director of the Tacoma Youth Chorus.

His research combines aspects of music history and theory with interdisciplinary work to offer new perspectives on issues of compositional process and reception history, ranging from orchestration and musical form to aesthetics and performance practice. He has particular specialties in the music of Vivaldi and Handel. His research has been published in journals such as Eighteenth-Century Music, Studi vivaldiani, Händel-Jahrbuch, and The Princeton University Library Chronicle. He has provided scholarly reference articles for Grove Music Online and Oxford Bibliographies Online, along with multiple reviews, album notes, and interviews for publications such as Early Music, Early Music America Magazine (EMAg), Eighteenth-Century Music, Notes (The Quarterly Journal of the Music Library Association), and The Avid Listener (W.W. Norton blog series). Dr. Lockey has presented at numerous conferences in the US and abroad, including papers given for the American Musicological Society national and regional meetings, the American Handel Society, the Society for Eighteenth-Century Music, the Georg-Friedrich-Handel Society (Hälle), the 14th Biennial International Baroque Conference (Belfast), and the Italian Vivaldi Institute (Venice).

As a performer on piano, harpsichord, organ, violin, and viola, Dr. Lockey’s repertoire ranges from Medieval music to modern pop & rock, with a special interest in music of the Baroque period. He was co-director of the University of Victoria Collegium Musicum and served for eight years as director of the early music ensemble at Princeton University. He has accompanied and directed numerous operas and musical theater works, including organizing and directing the Western hemisphere premiere of highlights of Vivaldi’s Chinese-themed opera Teuzzone. In addition to recitals, he has given lecture-recitals and collaborative performances with specialists in early music and historical dance for the Princeton University Art Museum, Historic Morven Museum and Gardens, and the Princeton Friends of Opera. At PLU, he studied piano with Dr. Calvin Knapp and Dr. Richard Farner, harpsichord with Kathryn Habedank, organ with Dr. Susan Ferré, viola with Betty Agent, voice with Barry Johnson, and composition with Dr. Gregory Youtz. At Princeton, he studied piano with Dr. Geoffrey Burleson, harpsichord with Wendy Young, and viola with Nicholas Cords.