Pioneering CMU music professor from Mt. Lebanon retires after 51-year teaching career
Natalie Ozeas
When Natalie Ozeas was growing up in Huntingdon in the 1940s, she started playing piano in first grade and clarinet in third grade.
Juniata College was close by, and a professor was writing a book about teaching kids instruments, for which Ozeas was a test subject. More than 70 years later, Ozeas, 81 of Mt. Lebanon, is retiring from a 50-year music teaching career.
“I always wanted to be in music,” she said.
She was a member of her high school’s marching band starting in the fifth grade and became one of the first three women to be in the Kiltie Band at Carnegie Mellon, then-Carnegie Institute of Technology, when she attended the school in the late 1950s.
After she finished her undergraduate degree in 1960, she embarked on a 51-year teaching career that spanned from Peters Township School District to Carnegie Mellon University. She started in her hometown of Huntingdon before moving to West Mifflin Elementary.
Ozeas then started to get involved in urban school districts in Pittsburgh, specifically with teaching music through eurythmics – physical movements as a means to teach music.
Her experience working in Pittsburgh City preschools led her to start the Urban Music Education Project in the 1990s. The project started with providing keyboards and drums to school districts in Pittsburgh. Now, the project dabbles in hip hop music.
“The need (in those schools) is why I do it,” said Ozeas, who has lived in Mt. Lebanon since 1969. “The fact is that research shows that participation in music helps them learn and gets them in school.”
Ozeas then spent most of the 1970s and 1980s at Peters Township, teaching music to middle and high school students, before spending the last 33 years in higher education.
Ozeas taught and directed the choirs at California University of Pennsylvania for five years before starting at CMU, where she recently retired as a professor of music education and the director of graduate studies at CMU’s School of Music.
“It’s been a wonderful experience,” she said. “It’s a very joyful experience for me. I love children making music, and I enjoy our college students because they’re incredibly talented.”
Ozeas said she’s happy that her influence on students and her experience has led students to want to teach in urban schools.
“It used to be that most teachers didn’t want to teach in urban schools,” Ozeas said. “But I have students coming to me telling me that they want to be in those schools.”
While Ozeas said she will spend her retirement visiting her four children and four grandchildren in California, that doesn’t mean she’s done teaching. She will continue to teach a graduate seminar at CMU and to work with the Urban Music Education Project.
She will also still visit some of her former students who live in New York City, whom she meets with annually, and stay in contact with former students all across the country.
“When you think about how many kids I’ve taught over the years, it really is amazing,” Ozeas said.