Lorraine June Kaprielian

June 24, 1927-November 6, 2024

Lorraine Kaprielian, an outstanding private classical piano teacher who touched the lives of hundreds of young students over the course of a lengthy career, entered her rest on November 6, 2024, at the age of 97. From 1951-1993, her stewardship of 42 years remains one of the longest of any music teacher in the Central Valley. She died peacefully at her home in Fresno from congestive heart failure.

Lorraine June Kaprielian was born June 24, 1927, in Fresno, California, to Armenian immigrant parents from the Ottoman Empire. Her father Charles Garabed Kaprielian (1890-1960) was born in Shepig and mother Aznive Mardiros Shooshan (1891-1954) was born in Harpoot and at the age of four was shot in the eye during a forced march targeting Christian Armenians. She survived miraculously and eventually emigrated to Boston where she received restorative plastic surgery in 1903. Aznive graduated from Fresno High School in 1914 and Charles attended Washington Union High School in Easton where he starred on the football team. Both Lorraine's mother and father were well-versed in classical English poetry and Aznive often would recite poems from memory for her young daughters.

Lorraine grew up in a farm house on Jensen Avenue near Sanger, where her father established and operated a thriving vineyard of Thompson seedless grapes, adjacent to two similar properties owned by his older brothers Gabe and Michael. She attended Lone Star Elementary and Sanger High School, and, along with her three sisters Eleanor Kaprielian Amirkhanian (1917-2007), Armorel K. Ohannesian (1921-2019), and Sylvia Kaprielian (b. 1931), studied classical piano at Fresno State College, where Lorraine excelled as a graduate of the class of 1948. Her professor of piano there was Miriam Fox Withrow, a student of Rudolf Ganz and Paul Hindemith.

Lorraine then entered the graduate program at the University of Southern California in 1950-51 where she studied with Hans Lempel as well as Alice Ehlers, a specialist in 17th and 18th Century music and a protégé of keyboard great Wanda Landowska. Madame Ehlers memorably ate dried prunes from her pocket as Lorraine played for her. As a student at USC, Lorraine had access to discounted tickets in the front row of the balcony to hear the Los Angeles Philharmonic playing the great classics under the direction of conductor Alfred Wallenstein.

Returning to Fresno, in November 1951, she opened a private practice on Van Ness Avenue near Home, where one of her first students was her sister Eleanor's son Charles Amirkhanian who went on to become a prominent composer, concert & radio producer, and founder of the San Francisco non-profit music organization Other Minds.

Lorraine subsequently taught at the Pianoforte School of Music on Hedges Avenue in the Tower District, founded in 1948 by Miss Withrow and led by Frances Savory, a graduate of Fresno State trained at the renowned Diller-Quayle School in New York. (Her husband was Fresno District Attorney E. Clark Savory.)

As a teacher, Lorraine taught beginning students to play scales from memory in every key signature, then introduced the rudiments of music theory to aid an understanding of the building blocks of classical composition. She eventually moved her practice to a new home she shared with her parents and sister Sylvia on Gettysburg Avenue, and when the family added a pool to the property, her students would enjoy an annual summer swim party that was eagerly awaited by her young charges.

Like her sisters, Lorraine was a lifelong attendee of concerts of the Fresno Musical Club that was active for decades, bringing the world's greatest classical music performers to the Central Valley. She heard pianists Dame Myra Hess, Walter Gieseking, Guiomar Novaes, Vladimir Horowitz, Sergei Rachmaninoff, and numerous other greats on a regular basis, deepening her love and understanding of the classical repertoire. She often was seen backstage afterwards, speaking with directly with the artists.

Lorraine was a member of the Pilgrim Armenian Congregational Church and later the Bethel Lutheran Church in Fresno. She also was a member of the Music Teachers' Association of California and the Pianoforte Alumni of Fresno.

Starting in 1983, she also served as a teacher's aid for 14 years beginning at Mayfair Elementary, particularly enjoying her interaction with Hmong children, newly arrived from Cambodia.

She is survived by her sister Sylvia Kaprielian, a long-serving elementary school teacher and reading specialist, with whom she lived over ninety years, both single women sharing mutual interests in youth education, music, and public service, including volunteering at Fresno Community Hospital. Other survivors include her niece Joan Ohannesian Ross (Robert Ross) of Santa Cruz, and grandniece Michal Ross (Desmond Ho) of Santa Barbara and great grandnephew Jaxon Ross Ho; another niece Jane Shelley Amirkhanian Johnson of Fresno, grandnephew Dylan Johnson (Claire Missire) and grandniece Kira Johnson of Morro Bay, and nephew Charles Amirkhanian (Carol Law) of El Cerrito, California.

Gifts in memory of Lorraine Kaprielian may be made to Bethel Lutheran Church of Fresno, Other Minds (San Francisco) and the Music Department of California State University, Fresno.

A graveside memorial service will be held on Friday April 11, 2025, at 11:00am, at Belmont Memorial Park in Fresno.