The toy piano, also known as the kinderklavier, is a small piano-like musical instrument. Most modern toy pianos use round metal rods, as opposed to strings in a regular piano, to produce sound. The U.S. Library of Congress recognizes the toy piano as a unique instrument with the subject designation, Toy Piano Scores: M175 T69. The most famous example of a dedicated composition for the instrument is the "Suite for Toy Piano" (1948) by John Cage.
Keith Jarrett is an American pianist and composer. Jarrett started his career with Art Blakey and later moved on to play with Charles Lloyd and Miles Davis. Since the early 1970s, he has also been a group leader and solo performer in jazz, jazz fusion, and classical music. His improvisations draw from the traditions of jazz and other genres, including Western classical music, gospel, blues, and ethnic folk music.
William Mark Wainwright, known professionally as William Orbit, is an English musician and record producer who has sold 200 million recordings worldwide of his own work, his production and song-writing work. He is a recipient of multiple Grammy Awards, Ivor Novello Awards and other music industry awards.
Joanna Clare MacGregor is a British concert pianist, conductor, composer, and festival curator. She is Head of Piano at the Royal Academy of Music and a professor of the University of London. She was artistic director of the International Summer School & Festival at Dartington Hall from 2015 to 2019.
Dame Zaha Mohammad Hadid was an Iraqi and British architect, artist and designer, recognized as a major figure in architecture of the late-20th and early-21st centuries. Born in Baghdad, Iraq, Hadid studied mathematics as an undergraduate and then enrolled at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in 1972. In search of an alternative system to traditional architectural drawing, and influenced by Suprematism and the Russian avant-garde, Hadid adopted painting as a design tool and abstraction as an investigative principle to "reinvestigate the aborted and untested experiments of Modernism [...] to unveil new fields of building".
Gabriela Montero is a Venezuelan pianist, known in particular for her real-time improvisation of complex musical pieces on themes suggested by her audience and other sources, as well as for performances of standard classical repertoire.
Sarah Cahill is an American pianist based in the Bay Area. She has also worked as a writer on music and as a radio show host.
Liberatum is an international cultural diplomacy organisation, multimedia and cultural content company founded by Pablo Ganguli in 2001. It creates and presents multidisciplinary artistic platforms and promotes contemporary arts, film, media, literature and culture worldwide through its own festivals, films, summits and other programming. Liberatum champions human rights, freedom of expression and women in creativity through its platforms across the world.
Sylvie Courvoisier is a composer, pianist, and improviser.
Zhou Yi is a Chinese pipa player.
Margaret Fingerhut is a British classical pianist. She is known for her innovative recital programmes and recordings in which she explores lesser known piano repertoire.
Sasha Kathrine Siem is a British-Norwegian singer-songwriter and composer.
Kathryn Stott is an English classical pianist who performs as a concerto soloist, recitalist and chamber musician. Her specialities include the English and French classical repertoire, contemporary classical music and the tango. She is a professor at the Royal Northern College of Music, Manchester and has organised several music festivals and concert series.
Hélène Binet is a Swiss-French architectural photographer based in London, who is also one of the leading architectural photographers in the world. She is most known for her work with architects Daniel Libeskind, Peter Zumthor and Zaha Hadid, and has published books on works of several architects.
Phamie Gow is a singer, composer, harpist, 21st century pianist, film and creative director and international recording artist.
Han Terra is a Korean-born inventor, composer and musician. She was a child prodigy and was performing by age 6 as a Korean kayageum player beginning her training at the age of 4. She has invented a 24 stringed musical instrument called TeRra incorporating artificial intelligence.
Fabio D'Andrea is a British Italian pianist, composer, songwriter and producer. He trained at King's College London under the composer George Benjamin.
The JS Bach Chamber Music Hall was a temporary structure designed by British-Iraqi architect Zaha Hadid, which was constructed for the Manchester International Festival in 2009. Hadid created the structure within a 425m2 hall inside Manchester Art Gallery to host a series of nine concerts of the solo compositions of JS Bach by international performers Piotr Anderszewski, Jean-Guihen Queyras and Alina Ibragimova.
Negin Zomorodi is an Iranian composer and pianist.
Victoria Borisova-Ollas is a Russian-Swedish composer who first received international recognition for her symphonic poem Wings of the Wind which won second prize in the 1998 Masterprize International Composition Competition in the UK.
