About
Dr. Felix Eisenhauer is constantly exploring how music can be a driver of positive social change to unite and empower individuals. Everyone has an inner artist waiting to be discovered and Felix uses his expertise as a musician and community leader to guide people on their journey of discovery.
As a teacher, Felix provides the space and patience students need to develop the strong technical and theoretical foundation necessary to become a musician who moves beyond the notes of the page and communicates through music. He runs a private piano studio and is Professor of Music at Ventura College. At Ventura College, he created a fully online piano class sequence to make music more accessible. He also mentors young adults starting their music careers on self-employed business practices that support successful careers.
As a composer, Felix writes primarily for solo piano and choirs. For piano, he creates works that combine the strong classical technical foundation he values as a teacher with contemporary sounds to bridge the past and the present, such as his “Inspirations” or “Etudes That Sound Awesome” collections. For choirs, two of his goals are promoting African-American Gospel and Spiritual music through engaging arrangements and making classical music more accessible by, for instance, creating a two-part arrangement of Handel's Messiah Chorus, allowing smaller or less-experienced choirs to engage with this vibrant music tradition. Select scores are available here for free.
As a performer, Felix' work in recent years has focused on music in the church. He provides music with meaning and uses classical, modern, and African-American genres to forge diverse connections. Trained as a classical pianist, Felix regularly offers works by master composers, such as Mozart, Schubert, or Brahms, while using ideas from the classical repertoire to craft modern piano renditions of traditional hymn tunes in a series titled "Inspirations." Various recordings can be heard here for free. While living in Boise, Idaho, Felix played for all the major music organizations in the area, including Opera Idaho, Ballet Idaho, Boise Philharmonic, Meridian Symphony Orchestra, Music Theatre of Idaho, and the Broadway tour of Wicked.
As a community leader, Felix is an elected official, serving on the Board of Trustees for his local elementary school district and as Music Minister at St. Paul’s Episcopal. As a Trustee, he supports improving school nutrition, strengthening social-emotion learning, and re-imagining schools as community hubs. He is also very involved at the elementary school his son attends and is developing a piano curriculum to offer music lesson school-wide through the classroom. As a Music Minister, Felix has built a strong ministry that encourages both musical and personal growth of those in the ministry.
Felix is also an academic at heart and loves the pursuit of knowledge. He holds a Doctor of Musical Arts in piano collaboration from the University of California - Santa Barbara, where he studied piano with Robert Koenig and Paul Berkowitz, vocal coaching with John Ballerino, and theory with Lee Rothfarb, a Master of Music and Bachelor of Music in piano performance from the University of Southern California, where he studied piano with Bernadene Blaha and Kevin Fitz-Gerald, harpsichord with Lucinda Carver, and pedagogy with Dennis Thurmond, and pursued independent studies in improvisation with Helmut Lörscher at the Musikhochschule in Freiburg, Germany. He continues his studies with Dr. Joel Ewing.
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Felix' involvement in education is equally long and storied. At Ventura College, he currently teaches piano class and Private Piano. At USC, he taught Class Piano and Private Piano. At UCSB, he worked as a coach and accompanist. At the College of Western Idaho, he taught Music Appreciation, served as the arts department lead, and ran a private studio. Felix started as a teacher’s assistant at the German-American School of Palo Alto, teaching at their Saturday and Summer programs for twenty years. In addition to teaching German, he has translated for De Haske Music Publishing and Gold Circle Films.
All pictures on this site were taken by Felix himself.