Tristan McKay is a pianist, educator, and scholar based in Detroit, Michigan. Celebrated for his “dramatic” and “assertive” playing (New York Times), he has premiered dozens of new solo and chamber works at iconic New York venues including Carnegie Hall, The Apollo Theater, The Chamber Music Society at Lincoln Center, Roulette, The Stone, The Kitchen, Spectrum, National Sawdust, Symphony Space, The Museum of the Moving Image, and The DiMenna Center for Classical Music; national venues including Pittsburgh Opera and Bowerbird (Pennsylvania), Avaloch Farm Music Institute (New Hampshire), and RedLine Contemporary Art (Colorado); and international venues including Powerhouse, The Box (Brisbane, Australia) and Soundscape Festival in Maccagno (Italy).
Tristan has over 20 years of teaching experience and currently runs a thriving virtual piano studio for students of all ages. His prize-winning students have received State Awards and Regional Gold Medals from the Royal Conservatory of Music as well as outstanding marks from local competitions and festivals. Tristan is also on faculty at the State University of New York at New Paltz where he has taught courses in music theory, piano performance, music history, and music criticism. He has conducted workshops, performances, and lectures as a guest artist at notable institutions such as Columbia University, New York University, The University of Chicago, The University of Colorado at Boulder, Denver School of the Arts, Denison University, Berea College, Nova University (Lisbon, Portugal), and Queensland Conservatorium (Brisbane, Australia). Equally dedicated to writing about the music of our time, Tristan published a monograph on contemporary music notations entitled The Semiotics of Open Notations: Ambiguity as Opportunity (Cambridge University Press) and has contributed articles on aesthetics and performance to peer-reviewed journals such as The American Journal of Semiotics, NOTES: Quarterly Journal of the Music Library Association, and Semiotics 2018: Resilience in an Age of Relation. As a contributing writer for the Seattle Symphony for the past two seasons, he has written program notes and feature articles for internationally acclaimed pianists including Sir Stephen Hough, Emanuel Ax, Bruce Liu, Joe Hisaishi, and Yulianna Avdeeva. He is also a contributing writer at I CARE IF YOU LISTEN, an award-winning hub for living music creators. Tristan is a graduate of New York University (PhD, BM) and Manhattan School of Music (MM), where he studied with Marilyn Nonken, Anthony de Mare, and Christopher Oldfather. |