A Natural History of the Piano

Stuart Isacoff is active across North America and Europe as a writer, pianist, composer and lecturer. His ongoing presence in the cultural landscape has included presentations at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art and Lincoln Center, as well as at festivals around the world and regular contributions on music and art to the Wall Street Journal. Until 2014, he was on the faculty of the Purchase College Conservatory of Music and the Purchase College Conservatory of Dance (SUNY). Isacoff is the author of A Natural History of the Piano: The Instrument, the Music, the Musicians-From Mozart to Modern Jazz and Everything in Between. He is a winner of the prestigious ASCAP Deems Taylor Award for excellence in writing about music, and the 2017 recipient of the Communications Prize awarded by the Artistic Committee of Cremona Musica. Stuart Isacoff has given lectures and piano performances both here and abroad, at such venues as the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, the Verbier Festival and Academy (Switzerland), Music@Menlo, the Portland Piano Festival, the Miami Piano Festival, the Irving S. Gilmore International Keyboard Festival, the September Music Festival (Torino), the Gina Bachauer Foundation, the Van Cliburn Piano Institute and others, as well as at such scientific institutions as the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the Bradbury Science Museum and the Perimeter Institute of Theoretical Physics. His compositions, arrangements, editions, and instructional texts have been published internationally. He was the founding editor of the magazine Piano Today, a position he held for nearly three decades. Stuart Isacoff's piano recitals combine classical repertoire with jazz improvisation, demonstrating the threads that connect musical works created centuries and continents apart. Of his playing, pianist André Watts has said: 'Stuart Isacoff's music-making is original and revelatory. Subtle, brilliant use of the instrument combined with a unique musical perspective, create performances of uncommon depth. Isacoff reveals his beautiful interior world with every performance.'