Upgrading Our Tech, Enhancing Their Future

Come join Dr. Sara Langmead for a benefit recital to fund the upgrade and redesign of MMTA's website. Every ticket purchased and donation given will be directed to MMTA's website upgrade and redesign. Let's come together to make a difference through the beauty of music!

Inspired to give back to the music organization she grew up with, artist-teacher Dr. Sara Langmead will perform a solo recital of masterworks by Clara Schumann, Ludwig van Beethoven, Felipe Padilla de Leon, Carmencita Guanzon Arambulo, Sarah Miller, Libby Larsen, and Samuel Barber to benefit the Minnesota Music Teachers Association website upgrade and redesign.

The MMTA Website Redesign

To serve students and teachers throughout all of Minnesota and efficiently run over 200 musical events every year, MMTA has heavily relied on it's website for everything from exams and recitals to workshops and conventions. For the past three years, members of the MMTA Board of Directors conducted thorough research for a website redesign that would fit the needs and budget of this non-profit organization. Happily, the updated website was launched in March 2025. As of April, the MMTA Foundation has raised $6500 toward the $23,000 expense. With looming upkeep expenses on the horizon, Sara hopes this benefit recital will inspire donations both immediately and in the long-term from friends, families, and community members who recognize the importance of quality music education throughout Minnesota.

Important Message for 2025 MMTA Convention Attendees:

As part of the 2025 MMTA Convention registration, all registered convention attendees receive free entrance to this benefit recital. Be that as it may, convention attendees are strongly encouraged to make a monetary donation to the website rebuild as well as to invite their families, students and their parents, and friends to this benefit recital.

Artist Profile: Dr. Sara Wandrei Langmead langmead.sara@macphail.org

A Minnesota native, Dr. Sara Wandrei Langmead holds DMA and MM degrees from the Peabody Conservatory of Music-Johns Hopkins University where she studied piano with Dr. Yoheved Kaplinsky, current chair of the Juilliard Piano Department. As a full-tuition Strelow Scholar, she received her BM degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Sara made her orchestral debut at age 16, won first prizes in the Schubert Club and UW-Madison Concerto competitions at the collegiate level, and as a teenager, was awarded full scholarships to study with Gyorgy Sebok for two summers at the Banff Centre in Canada. In 1997, she won first prize at the International Sigma Alpha Iota Competition. She is deeply grateful to her mentors, including Veda Kaplinsky, the late Gyorgy Sebok, the late Dominique Weber, Julian Martin, Dr. Sharon Levy, Dr. Eileen Soskin, Anthony di Bonaventura, Dr. Todd Welbourne, Howard Karp, and MMTA teacher Jeanné Reher, for seeing her potential and helping her harness it.

Starting in 1997, Dr. Langmead held successive piano faculty positions at St. Mary’s College-Maryland, the University of Missouri-Columbia, Columbia College-Missouri, and at Mercyhurst University-Pennsylvania, where she was Assistant Professor of Piano and Director of Keyboard Studies. After a 2004 season of fourteen different concerts and the birth of her second child, Dr. Langmead chose full-time work as a parent over her tenure-track position in academia. Over the next 18 years, she raised four children and built a successful private piano studio in Circle Pines, Minnesota.

Since 2022, Dr. Langmead has been a Teaching Artist in Piano at MacPhail Center for Music and since 2024, Adjunct Professor of Piano at St. Cloud State University. Her students have participated in numerous recitals, competitions, masterclasses, and performance/theory exams through Minneapolis Music Teachers Forum, St. Paul Piano Teachers Association, Minnesota Music Teachers Association, and the MacPhail Honors and Concerto Competitions. Many of her students have been accepted into college programs at schools such as Manhattan School of Music, UCLA, UW-Madison, UM-Twin Cities, and UM-Duluth. In the summer of 2023, Dr. Langmead joined the faculty of the Young Artists Piano Camp, a piano intensive of masterclasses, performances, lessons, and musicianship classes, teaching alongside Dr. Paul Wirth and Dr. Andrew Staupe. In July 2025, Van Cliburn medal winner, Kenny Broberg, will join the faculty as guest artist and teacher.

Dr. Sara Langmead is committed to expanding the canon of solo piano literature to include traditionally underrepresented composers throughout history and from around the globe. In 2024-2025, as the recipient of research grants from the Music Teachers National Association and MacPhail Center for Music, Dr. Langmead curated MacPhail’s IDEA Syllabus and the March 2025 Women’s History Month Festival. The four hour festival, featuring students and faculty from all four MacPhail campuses, was free and open to the public, inspiring the audience through live music, educational commentary, and video clips of composer and performer stories.

At the local and national level, Dr. Langmead performs as a soloist and chamber musician. She also presents workshops regarding piano technique, musical gesture, gender representation in piano literature, and Women Play Beethoven, her lecture-recital highlighting the legacy and phenomenon of women who have performed and recorded the complete piano sonata cycle of Beethoven. Dr. Langmead’s lifelong passion for all piano music enriches the lives of her students and listeners by communicating passionate, creative, and academic insight through her enthusiastic teaching, performance, studio class, adjudication, writing, and discussion.