COUNTRY LIVING Concert pianist returns to her roots

Nancy Zipay DeSalvo has been on the Westminster College faculty since 1991.
By PETER H. MILLIKEN
VINDICATOR TRUMBULL STAFF
WARREN -- An international concert pianist who grew up on a Hartford dairy farm and has worked with some of the world's top musicians rates the Mahoning and Shenango valleys as highly desirable places to live and work.
"I have always missed the country. Even when I lived in New York City, I was wishing I could bring my job back to the country," said Nancy Zipay DeSalvo of Warren, chairwoman of the music department at Westminster College in New Wilmington, Pa.
"When you drive into New Wilmington and you see the [Amish] horse and buggy going by, and you hear the clippety-clop of the horses, it just kind of calms you down and makes you feel like you're back in another time," she said.
"You just don't have that anxiety that you might have in a big city," she added.
"I think Warren is a very pretty city. The downtown area is just beautiful. I wish it would grow a little more," DeSalvo said.
A daughter of William and Irene Zipay, who reside on the Hartford Township farm, DeSalvo graduated from Joseph Badger High School and obtained a bachelor of music degree from Youngstown State University's Dana School of Music.
Background
"I learned very early on that I had a strong passion for playing the piano, and I knew at that point that that was the only thing I wanted to do," she recalled.
Her mother bought her a small record player when she was about 5 years old, and they would go weekly to a five-and-dime store and buy Gilbert and Sullivan records, she said. "I guess I just fell in love with music that way," she observed.
"Once I started the first grade and noticed the old clunker in the corner at Hartford Elementary School, I just started plunking around with the piano, and a little girlfriend of mine played the piano, and I'd watch her play," she said.
She recalled being so engrossed in piano playing at school that she missed the homebound school bus many times. However, she noted: "My talent wasn't discovered until I was actually in the seventh grade."
Having acquired a cast-off piano at home while she was in the fifth grade, she took piano lessons beginning in the seventh grade and entered YSU after a Dana faculty member called her home asking why she hadn't auditioned for admission to Dana.
"My father and mother got me a paper route so I could pay tuition," she recalled.
After leaving Dana, she went to New York City, where she received a master's degree from the Manhattan School of Music and worked as a staff accompanist and coach in the studio of world-renowned violin teacher Dorothy Delay at the Juilliard School of Music.
Delay offered DeSalvo the accompanying job after discovering her in 1973 at the Aspen Music Festival in Colorado, which DeSalvo had been chosen to attend through competitive auditions.
"Whether you accompany singers or anyone else, you have to be a very proficient pianist because you have to be flexible. You have to be able to listen and play at the same time," DeSalvo said.
"You have to be very sensitive to all the nuances that the singer is doing or the instrumentalist is doing, such as,, when are they breathing? You can't just keep playing when they're breathing. You have to breathe with them," she explained.
Veteran performer
After obtaining her master's degree, De Salvo traveled to Hong Kong, where she performed with the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra, and to Macao, where she performed chamber-music recitals.
She was an artist in residence for 17 years at the Bay View Music Festival in Michigan and has taught music at the University of Tennessee, Ohio University, Kent State University's Trumbull Campus and Thiel College.
Having returned to the Mahoning Valley around 1990 to be close to family members, she has been on Westminster's faculty since 1991.
There, she teaches piano, accompanying and music theory, performs solo recitals, accompanies visiting artists, and oversees seven full-time and 27 adjunct faculty and about 100 students majoring in music.
By 1990, she recalled: "I had just been away long enough, had done enough, that I realized that I could probably do what I do anywhere I'd go. And I might as well do it here because I can be near my family."
Besides offering an affordable cost of living, the Mahoning Valley is ideally situated for her profession because it is relatively close to the cultural centers of Cleveland and Pittsburgh and equidistant between New York and Chicago, she noted.
She also likes the private liberal arts college atmosphere at Westminster College. "I liked it because it was a small school, and it gave me a lot of opportunity to do what I wanted to do there," she said.
She also said she has a sentimental attraction to Westminster because it was there, at age 15, that she gave her first solo public piano recital.
Where she performs
DeSalvo has played the piano, harpsichord and celesta with the Greenville Symphony Orchestra and frequently performs with the Youngstown Symphony Orchestra. She has also performed with the Warren Philharmonic Orchestra.
She began her doctoral work at Florida State University, and she received her doctor of musical arts degree from the Cleveland Institute of Music and Case Western Reserve University.
She has been on the prestigious roster of Steinway Artists since 2002, and a Steinway grand piano is the centerpiece of the living room in the contemporary ranch home where she resides with her husband, John.
This summer, she'll accompany James Flowers, a saxophonist on Westminster's faculty, at the Saxophone International Conference in Slovenia.
When she isn't teaching, performing or judging music competitions, she enjoys many forms of outdoor recreation, including mountain hiking and backpacking, bicycling, kayaking and cross-county skiing.
milliken@vindy.com