Olive Blu

Olive Blu was born and raised in the east of Switzerland. Because she grew up in a very Christian household, all she listened to in her childhood was Christian and classical music. After intense begging, her parents granted her piano lessons at the age of 6. In her teenage years, Olive joined the Teen-Band in her church, where she acquired basic knowledge of chord structures, how to accompany and how to play music with other people. Around the same time at the age of 12 she got her own iPod and with that the freedom to listen to the music she always heard at friends’ houses. She started playing the songs she heard in the music charts on the piano and fell in love with harmonic structures.

Although she did spend a lot of time at the piano, she was always poorly prepared for her classical piano lessons. That changed when she started studying with pianist and teacher Milena Mateva around the age of 17. Olive discovered her love for the expression in classical music and the complexity of emotions that a musician is able to express on the piano. Two years later, she started applying to Music Universities that offered Majors in piano music. She’s currently studying in her third year with pianist and professor Yvonne Lang at Lucerne University for Applied Science. She’s also been to several Master Classes all over Europe with teachers like Eugene Alcalay - a student of Leonard Bernstein, concert pianist Reto Reichenbach and Bianca Bodalia - director of the Richard-Strauss Conservatory in Munich.

Later she discovered her interest in song writing. She finds herself writing rather witty and borderline sarcastic lyrics. She also puts a lot of thought in the harmonic aspect of her songs, where having a background in classical music theory helps her come up with her own chord progressions.