Linda Henderson

Linda Henderson is an associate professor in the Ira Brind School of Theater in College of Performing Arts at University of the Arts. She is responsible for the musical literacy of all Musical Theater majors and teaches a sequential four-semester curriculum of piano instruction in a class setting, taught concurrently with the program’s music skills component. Linda meets students at their individual levels when they arrive as freshmen, working with them to improve their reading at the keyboard and explore their own creativity as composers and as accompanists for themselves.

Linda is a coach/accompanist for the students in junior year, collaborating with them in classroom showings in Musical Theater Performance courses. After working with them in piano classes, it is gratifying to note their progress in the language of reading and analyzing music when they reach junior year.

She has served as music director for three Brind School productions—1776 in 2008, Good Person of Szechwan in 2011 and Big River in 2012. Good Person of Szechwan led to an invitation to deliver a paper titled “The Sister Art of Music in Brecht’s Plays” at the International Society for the Study of European Ideas Conference in Nicosia, Cyprus, in 2012.

A busy professional in and around Philadelphia, Linda has been playing keyboard in pit orchestras of national Broadway tours since 1997, most recently in the runs of Beautiful and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. She also plays regularly with Opera Philadelphia, such as playing harpsichord and celeste in Benjamin Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Academy of Music. She had the distinct honor of being singled out for her playing in two Opera Magazine reviews of Breaking the Waves and Elizabeth Cree. Other recent performances include playing celeste in the Pennsylvania Ballet’s production of The Nutcracker and accompanying the Philadelphia Boys’ Choir in several concerts in late 2018.

Internationally, Linda has held workshops for Musical Theater students at the University of Trinidad and Tobago and the Performing Center Austria in Vienna, where she has also performed as collaborative pianist in concerts with faculty. For the past three years, she has been the accompanist and the featured pianist for the Delaware Choral Academy in Aix en Provence, France. (The academy is a three-week, intensive choral workshop with multiple performances in some of the most beautiful cathedrals in Europe.) She is also a featured collaborative pianist at the Zimbalista Music Factory, a one-week festival of classical and world music in Tefen, Israel.

Linda’s parallel musical life is that of a steel drummer, as which she has toured with Delaware Steel in Germany, Sweden, Israel, Austria and Greece since 2008. She is also involved as a volunteer player and teacher for Peace Drums, an organization committed to providing a shared experience of music-making to Israeli young people of different religious faiths (peacedrumsproject.org).

Linda earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Piano Performance, graduating Indiana University of Pennsylvania magna cum laude in 1978. She also holds Master of Music in Piano Performance with a concentration in Accompanying from West Chester University in 1982, when she graduated summa cum laude.