Gretchen is a pianist based in San Jose, California.  She completed her doctoral degree at Temple University, where she studied in the studio of Charles Abramovic as a University Fellow. Gretchen has given recitals for numerous concert series throughout the US East Coast including a fully televised recital for WSKG’s TV series Expressions.  She also has been heard performing and/or been interviewed on the WCNY, WSKG, and WPEL radio stations, as well as WSKG’s television show Artist Café. In November of 2016 she gave a lecture-recital on 20th century piano literature of unusual and often unearthly beauty by a group of lesser-known Norwegian composers, whose music she performed in many venues on the East and West Coasts in her winter/spring 2017 recital tour, "The Glacier is Silent."

 

A past participant in the Chautauqua Piano Program and the International Keyboard Institute and Festival in NYC, she has been a semifinalist in the Pianale International Piano Academy and Competition in Schlitz, Germany. She has also been a selected participant of the rigorous Domaine Forget Solo Piano program in Québec, Canada and studied harpsichord in classes with Ketil Haugsand at the Ringve Early Music program at Sund in Trøndelag, Norway.  Gretchen has performed in masterclasses led by Garrick Ohlsson, Ignat Solzhenitsyn, Jerome Rose, Marcantonio Barone, Angela Cheng, Benedetto Lupo, Louis Lortie, and Sonia Lee (harpsichord), among others.  

​

In spring of 2022, she served as interim adjunct piano professor at the Greatbatch School of Music, Houghton College.  She also maintains a private studio and serves as piano faculty at the Csehy Summer School of Music (USA). She has formerly lectured in Piano and Music History (antiquity to late Baroque) at Eastern University.  She was also the pianist of the Philadelphia-based piano trio Trio Amaranth.  Other past teachers include Ms. Natalie Zhu, Ms. Rebecca Penneys, Dr. Michael Landrum, Dr. Samuel Hsu, and Ms. Monique Leduc.  Gretchen Hull received her master’s degree at Temple University and her undergraduate degree from Houghton College, where she studied under Leon Fleisher student William Newbrough.  Graduate research areas included her dissertation on the signification of the sublime aesthetic in Romantic piano repertoire, a semiotic theory of sehnsucht in the music of Edvard Grieg, a linear-motivic analysis of Bartók's Piano Sonata Sz. 80 (Sostenuto e pesante), a lecture-recital on Norwegian piano repertoire of the early to mid-20th century, and others.