Cecil Lytle was raised the last in a family of ten children in New York City. Music became his life at an early age. Lytle studied at the Julliard School of Music while in high school, enrolled at Oberlin College in Ohio and continued graduate studies in Music at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.
While in graduate school, he won First Prize at the Franz Liszt International Piano Competition in Budapest, Hungary (1970), and subsequently concertized throughout the world in Asia, South America, Europe and the United States
He has been a professor of music at Grinnell College in Iowa and joined the music faculty at the University of California San Diego (UCSD) in 1974, served a stint as department chair, then Provost of UCSD’s Thurgood Marshall College 1988-2005
Cecil Lytle was elected Outstanding UCSD Faculty in 1994; Visiting Professor at the Beijing Conservatory of Music, Spring 1986; and, Artist-In-Residence at the Darmstadt Contemporary Music Festival (West Germany), Summer 1988
Because he believes that education changed his fortunes as a youngster growing up in Harlem, he has dedicated himself to providing opportunities for all aspiring young people
His dedication to quality education for all led him to found Preuss School (a college prep public charter school for low income student, grades 6-12) in 1998 on the campus of UC San Diego, and served ten years as the Founding Chair of the school’s Board of Directors.
2011 is the occasion of the 200th birthday of one of the most enigmatic and influential artists of the 19th century, Franz Liszt (1811-1886). Love and hated throughout most of his life, Liszt knew, shaped, and supported every emerging arts and political movement of his era. By the age of nine, young Franz Liszt was praised about across Europe as the second Mozart. However, not content with the fleeting fame of the prodigy, he sequestered himself to develop upon the foundational training he received from the greatest piano pedagogue in Europe. Carl Czerny. During a long ten-year pilgrimage across Europe, he developed what he called a “transcendental technique’ for playing the piano. Consequently, he composed and performed a piano music that reinvented conventional pianism as well as the physical and kinetic relation of the body to the piano. In his compositions and performances, no longer would music be simply two dimensional (melody and accompaniment) but enhanced to incorporate 3 or 4 dimensions of activity at the piano. His celebrated Paganini Etudes (1851) and Transcendental Etudes (1852) soon became the mainstay of the piano repertoire and altered the way other composed music for the piano. 
