Last Updated on 2022-08-07 | Originally Posted on 2017-09-29
Broc is a pianist and organist who pursued his music career part-time for most of his adult life until he left his business career in the mid-2010s. Now, he teaches piano, serves as a church musician, and performs recitals in-person and online.
Mr. Hite resumed teaching piano privately in 2016. In the fall of 2017, he became a piano instructor at the Shepherd Music School, and later at Broc Hite Piano Studio, both based at Central United Methodist Church in Rogers. As an aspiring freelance Web developer, he used his skills to rebuild the school’s Website and build his own Website from scratch.
Mr. Hite was Organist and Associate Director of Music at the First United Methodist Church of Bella Vista from 2012 to 2022. He enjoyed playing for the Chancel Choir and the Praise Band, crossing the border from Traditional to Contemporary worship each Sunday morning.
He enjoyed programming special music for services, including cycles of organ works by Bach, Vierne, and Peeters. He also shared his joy of piano repertoire in his Piano Postlude series, performing entire collections by Albéniz, Bach, Brahms, Chopin, Granados, and Schubert.
He also spent several years working for the church’s professional Wesley Series of concerts as a performer, artist facilitator, and social media director until the series ended in 2017.
Before relocating to Arkansas in 2010, he had two long-term church jobs in Connecticut. He was Organist/Choir Director at the United Methodist Church of Danbury from 1993 to 2003, and Organist and Music Director at St. Timothy’s Episcopal Church in Fairfield from 2004 to 2010. He founded the Choral Scholars program at St. Tim’s to attract the area’s finest high school students to participate as section leaders in the choir.
Broc Hite is native to the Mid-Hudson River Valley of New York State. He started playing the piano at age nine and became the regular organist at a small United Methodist Church at age 15. He spent his first two undergraduate years at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, where he studied piano with Veronica Jochum and piano pedagogy with Jean Stackhouse.
He earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Piano Performance from Purchase College in Purchase, New York, studying under German Diez, chamber music with Yehudi Wyner, and organ with Robert Fertitta. For two years following his graduation from Purchase, he taught piano at the Rockland Conservatory of Music in Spring Valley, New York.
He continued his studies with a Master of Music in Piano Accompanying (Collaborative Piano) from The Juilliard School in New York City, studying with Marshall Williamson and Margo Garrett. He also worked with Samuel Sanders and Jonathan Feldman.
While at Juilliard, he performed with instrumental and vocal majors and collaborated with members of the Juilliard Opera Center. He performed several times on classical radio stations in NYC, including WNCN and WQXR.
He taught piano and accompanied ballet classes at the Connecticut Conservatory of Dance and Music in New Milford, Connecticut, in the early 1990s. During the mid-to-late 1990s, he rehearsed and performed regularly with the Danbury Concert Chorus, including accompanying major choral works on piano and organ by Haydn, Berlioz, Fauré, and Rutter.
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