Sandra Coursey, DMA, a pianist and music educator known professionally as Keytress, will deliver a lecture in the Irene Casteel Endowed Speaker Series on Tuesday, November 4, 2025 from 4:30 – 6:00 PM in the McIntosh Center Ballroom.
Coursey earned her Doctor of Musical Arts from Bowling Green State University. As a doctoral student, Coursey co-founded the chamber quintet Newhonia, which received an academic residency at Interlochen. Her dissertation, titled “Portraits of a Wonderful Musician: Exploring the Intersection of Graduate Music Student Experiences and Mental Health Through Poetic Inquiry,” conducted eight semi-structured interviews with students or former students of graduate music programs to produce a series of eight poems titled Portraits of a Wonderful Musician.
Now, Coursey is known professionally as Keytress, offering piano lessons and piano tuning in addition to selling music education resources. Testimonials on the Keytress website commend her as “an exceptional piano instructor” who is “knowledgeable and passionate.”
Keytress is also responsible for founding the “Sleeping Beauties” project, which “revives the overlooked works of historical women composers through modern recordings and performances.” Coursey explained to Northern Review, “I chose this title not just for the fairytale reference, but for the scientific term used for overlooked research…The process of finding this music has been like musical archeology. You dig through dirt for hours in hopes of finding a fossil that proves prior existence.”
For me, it was striking to realize that I had been playing piano for 20+ years, learning hundreds of works by men, before ever learning a composition by a woman.
Sandra Coursey, DMA
Keytress has since announced that these recordings will be used to compose her first solo piano album, Sleeping Beauties: Rediscovered Piano Dances: “This album is all about reawakening the spirits of these women composers of the past through sharing their music with the world.” Some of Keytress’ recordings have already been uploaded to YouTube.
The Irene Casteel Endowed Speaker Series aims to “support the critical examination of culture and society.” Now in its fourth academic year of existence, previous speakers have discussed the therapeutic role of tabletop role-playing games, the destructive power of using bad metaphors, and new challenges in content moderation of the metaverse. According to an ONU public announcement, the series was “created for the purpose of bringing to Ohio Northern University experts in the fields of education, professional studies, and the social sciences to address issues that will impact society within the next five to ten years.”
The Irene Casteel Endowed Speaker Series is funded, in part, with the support of the Irene Casteel Endowed Chair of Education, Professional, and Social Sciences. Previously, the lecture was co-sponsored by the School of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, the Department of Art and Communication, and Northern Review.
Northern Review’s exclusive coverage of past Irene Casteel lectures can be found here:
2024: Tobias Buckell, “How Bad Metaphors Hurt Us”
2023: Rachel Kowert, “Moderating the Metaverse”
Editor’s Note: This article was updated (9/28/2025) to correct unattributed quotes.
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