NOTE:  THE CONCERT DATE HAS BEEN MOVED  - NEW DATE  JUNE 8, 2012

The Factory Arts String Quartet returns to close our 2011-2012 season.  Joined by Heather Taves their program includes the Shostakovich piano quintet.  To learn more about the Factory Arts String Quartet - click here

HEATHER TAVES

Pianist, keyboard artist, composer, improvisor and electronic artist Heather Taves performs in avante-garde, classical, jazz, folk, alternative, and electronic idioms. 

Emerging first as a classical concert pianist, she was acclaimed in the classical music industry by age sixteen when she entered McGill University, and her graduation recital at age nineteen was broadcast nationwide in Canada by the CBC. In the same year, she performed the Rachmaninoff Concerto No. 3 with the McGill Symphony Orchestra under Uri Mayer, won the Grand Prize for all categories of the Quebec Music Festival, and first prizes in the CMC and the National Festival of Music with her trio, the Trio de Quebec. She also won scholarships to the Banff and Orford Arts Centres, and a Canada Council Grant to obtain her Master of Music at Indiana University. 

In the creative environment of Indiana University, then ranked the number one music school in the United States, she joined the legendary piano class of Gyorgy Sebok, but simultaneously discovered her interests in jazz, world music, early music and improvisation. She was the first pianist at Indiana to study harpsichord in the newly formed Early Music Institute, the first piano performance student to study jazz piano literature with the eminent jazz professor David Baker, and the first performance student to earn a minor in world music in the I.U. Folklore Institute. On graduating from Indiana, she became a concert artist based in Montreal, performing over 80 concerts a year while teaching part-time at the McGill Conservatory, and working with composers and dancers including the great choreographer James Kudelka. 

At age 30, she won a major Quebec fellowship to obtain her doctorate at Stony Brook in New York, at the time a mecca for emerging contemporary musicians. There she studied with Gilbert Kalish, while interacting with such fellow students - now major international contemporary musicians - as Jaqueline LeClair of Alarm Will Sound, Todd Reynolds of the Bang On a Can Allstars, Scott Rawls of the Steve Reich Ensemble, Lisa Moore, Michael Lowenstern, Ellen Jewett, Oded Zehavi and others. Completing her doctorate in two years, she was immediately offered a tenure-track professorship at Brock University, where she founded the Rodman Hall gallery series showcasing new music, and four years later her current position at Wilfrid Laurer University. Hired alongside James Parker at Laurier, The Record wrote of their duo performance, “It was a thrill to hear the teamwork of Heather Taves and James Parker. Both are celebrated performers in their own right”. 

Since then, she has integrated her love of undergraduate teaching in her home country of Canada with a international performing career in diverse genres. Her appearances have ranged from the Madras Philharmonic series in India to the Lord Selkirk East Coast Music Festival, from Place des Arts in Montreal to The Guild art space in Charlottetown, from Merkin Hall in New York to the Prague Spring Festival and Radio Zurich in Europe. Her solo new music performances have been personally praised by such icons of contemporary music as Elliott Carter, John Cage, and George Crumb, all of whom worked with her to present their works. Her own compositions have been recorded on two CDs.

Hear Heather Taves - click here