Beth Sussman is a Juilliard-trained pianist and Master Teaching Artist whose love of music has taken her from concert stages throughout Europe and North America to classrooms and schools across Southern California. She has worked with leading arts organizations including The Los Angeles Music Center, The Kennedy Center, and Segerstrom Center for the Arts.
While Beth is an accomplished performer, one of her greatest joys is sharing the beauty and excitement of classical music with young people. Through school performances, workshops, residencies, and teacher professional development, she brings music to life in ways that invite students to listen, move, imagine, and discover their own connections to the arts.
Beth has presented professional development for teachers and educators-in-training at Cal State Fullerton, Hofstra University, Diller-Quaile School of Music, and numerous school districts throughout Southern California, including LAUSD, Burbank, Glendale, Bassett, Mountain View, and Castaic. She also served as a lead teacher for The Music Center’s Institute for Educators for six consecutive years.
Beth believes deeply that music and movement are essential to a well-rounded education—and that the arts can open doors for students who may learn, express themselves, and make connections in different ways. Her goal is simple: to help every student experience the joy, wonder, and possibility that music can bring.
Student Programming
Workshops & Residencies
Beth Sussman’s workshops and residencies use the joy and accessibility of music as a pathway to deeper understanding across the curriculum. Through engaging, hands-on musical experiences, students learn musical vocabulary and develop an appreciation for a wide range of music, with a special emphasis on classical music, while also building skills in teamwork, listening, and critical thinking.
Along the way, students discover academic concepts such as main idea, comparing and contrasting, fractions, symbols, and author’s purpose—often without even realizing they are learning them through music! Beth also places a special emphasis on steady beat, a foundational musical skill with important connections to reading fluency. Her Hollywood-produced video, "Joppity Learns Steady Beat", is available free on YouTube and features children and puppets learning through music and movement while keeping a steady beat.
Beth has had great success using music and movement to support emerging readers and strengthen reading fluency. Each lesson is thoughtfully customized to meet the needs and interests of the school and its students.
Programs are available for students in Pre-K through 5th grade and can be designed as a series of four to ten workshops.
School Assemblies
Beth Sussman is the first and only classical pianist on The Music Center On Tour roster. Her lively, interactive assemblies bring classical music down to earth, showing students that the music they hear in concert halls can also be found in cartoons, commercials, movies, and everyday life.
Students aren’t simply an audience—they become part of the experience. They might move and dance to the rhythm of the “Juba Dance” by African-American composer Nathaniel Dett, use musical vocabulary to suggest an interpretation that Beth brings to life at the piano, or explore the mood and character of a piece by Mexican composer Manuel Ponce.
With humor, energy, and plenty of audience participation, Beth invites students to listen in a new way and discover that classical music can be exciting, accessible, and surprisingly familiar.
Professional Development
"Musically Speaking" is a teacher friendly PD workshop that shows participants how to use musical terms and percussion instruments to bring text to life in an easy and engaging manner. Step by step written instructions, and musical examples for each musical term (through a link on the sound cloud) teach participants the musical terms and their symbols as we learn to "notate" or "score" a story using context clues. Sound props and percussion instruments (instructions are included on how to make simple percussion instruments, if desired) are then added to highlight the text. This method engages English language learners as well as native speakers in a fun way that emphasizes critical thinking, teamwork, cooperation, creativity, rehearsing and revising.