Reinventing the Piano

Dan Trueman is a composer, fiddler, and electronic musician. He began studying violin at the age of 4, and decades later, after a chance encounter, fell in love with the Norwegian Hardanger fiddle, an instrument and tradition that has deeply affected all of his work, whether as a fiddler, a composer, or musical explorer. For over a decade, Dan has taught the year-long 16th- and 18th-century counterpoint sequence at Princeton, where he is a professor of music composition. He works with graduate students in Princeton's renowned composition program on their creative and academic work through seminars on various topics, composition mentoring, and dissertation advising, and he is also Director of the Princeton Sound Kitchen concert series, the primary venue for composers in the department to workshop and share their work. Dan co-founded the Princeton Laptop Orchestra (PLOrk) in 2005 with Princeton Computer Science professor Perry Cook, which has served as a model for rethinking how to teach music technology over the last decade. Dan works with some of the world’s pre-eminent musicians and ensembles, and his music has been heard around the world; his 10th CD, The Nostalgic Synchronic Etudes, was released by New Amsterdam Records in the Fall of 2015.

Adam Sliwinski has built a dynamic career of creative collaboration as percussionist, pianist, conductor, teacher, and writer. He specializes in bringing composers, performers, and other artists together to create exciting new work. A member of the ensemble So Percussion (proclaimed as “brilliant” and “consistently impressive” by the New York Times) since 2002, Adam has performed at venues as diverse as Carnegie Hall, The Bonnaroo Festival, Disney Concert Hall with the LA Philharmonic, and everything in between. So Percussion has also toured extensively around the world, including multiple featured performances at the Barbican Centre in London, and tours to France, Germany, The Netherlands, South America, Australia, and Russia.

Adam is co-director of the So Percussion Summer Institute, an annual intensive course on the campus of Princeton University for college-aged percussionists. He is also co-director of the percussion program at the Bard College Conservatory of Music, and has taught percussion both in masterclass and privately at more than 80 conservatories and universities in the USA and internationally. Along with his colleagues in So Percussion, Adam is Edward T. Cone performer-in-residence at Princeton University. He received his Doctor of Musical Arts and his Masters degrees at Yale with marimba soloist Robert van Sice, and his Bachelors at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music with Michael Rosen.

Pianist Cristina Altamura authentically embraces the European piano tradition while still capturing the spirit of a contemporary, multi-ethnic world. In the past year alone, her activities in New York City have ranged from participation in an epic concert by 24 of New York’s finest new music pianists of book one of J.S. Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier at the Spectrum Performance Space, to a New York Times-reviewed collaboration at (Le) Poisson Rouge with her husband Adam Sliwinski and composer Dan Trueman with his innovative “bitKlavier” instrument, to pioneer B-girl Ana “Rokafella” Garcia’s multi-disciplinary breakdance production “Out of the Bachx” at the New Victory Theater. Her solo recitals are designed with this duality of tradition and innovation always in mind.

Cristina’s artistry – which has been described as “rich in abandon and emotional surprises,” (Amici della Musica, Bologna) – stems from a deep connection to her Italian-born parents. Her mother, a master voice teacher, who studied singing during opera’s golden era with Maria Callas’ teacher and at the Verdi Conservatory in Milan, has had a profound influence on her bel canto-informed Chopin interpretations.

Adam Tendler has been called "an exuberantly expressive pianist" who "vividly displayed his enthusiasm for every phrase" by The Los Angeles Times, an “intrepid...outstanding...maverick pianist” by The New Yorker, a "modern-music evangelist" by Time Out New York, and a pianist who "has managed to get behind and underneath the notes, living inside the music and making poetic sense of it all," by The Baltimore Sun, who continued, "if they gave medals for musical bravery, dexterity and perseverance, Adam Tendler would earn them all."

Recognized as a leading interpreter of American music, Tendler has performed solo recitals in all fifty United States, including engagements at Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, Symphony Space, Columbia University, The Fisher Center at Bard College, Princeton University, New York University, Bennington College, Kenyon College, Boston Conservatory, San Francisco Conservatory, Portland State University, University of Nebraska, University of Alaska and Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music, as well as artistic landmarks like Houston's Rothko Chapel, The Rubin Museum, Joe’s Pub, Stonewall Inn, and James Turrell's Skypace in Sarasota, where he was the space's first musical performer.

Gavin Black is the Director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center and is an organist and harpsichordist . Gavin Black is best known for his recordings of seventeenth-century keyboard music on the PGM label. He studied organ and harpsichord with Paul Jordan and Eugene Roan, and conducting with Jahja Ling and Otto-Werner Mueller, and attended Princeton University and Westminster Choir College. He served as Associate University Organist at Princeton from 1977 to1979, while a student there, and was Organist and Senior Choir Director at Hillsborough Reformed Church, Millstone, New Jersey, from 1988 until 1994. He has been a teacher of organ, harpsichord, clavichord and continuo-playing since 1979, teaching from time to time at Westminster Choir College and at the Westminster Conservatory of Music. He currently writes a monthly column on organ and harpsichord teaching for The Diapason.

Gavin Black has also been a founding member of several chamber ensembles, including the Princeton Baroque Ensemble, Whitechapel Baroque, and Channel Crossings. He is currently the continuo player for the ensemble Col Legno.