Pianist Steven Mayer Performs Music Inspired by African American Song and Dance in Free Concert at Pitt July 16

Having long been associated with the music of legendary jazz pianist Art Tatum, Mayer will perform selections by Tatum and other exemplars of the Black Virtuoso Tradition—a term used to describe the American solo piano repertoire inspired by African American song and dance.

Mayer’s concert will open with “Bamboula” by 19th-century New Orleans composer and pianist Louis Moreau Gottschalk. The program also will include works by Scott Joplin, Jelly Roll Morton, James P. Johnson, Thomas “Fats” Waller, and Antonin Dvořák (DVOR-zhak), whose American Suite, composed in New York in 1894, incorporates cakewalk, plantation song, and minstrelsy.

The Mayer concert is being presented during a three-week teacher-training institute that will take place on the Pitt campus July 12 through 30. Sponsored by the PSO, with support from Pitt’s Center for American Music, the institute—titled “Dvořák in America”—will bring together 25 teachers from around the United States to study the life and works of Dvořák, the great Czech composer who, after coming to America in 1892, wrote music that helped Americans define and understand themselves.

Mayer has performed with the New York Chamber Symphony, as well as with the San Francisco, St. Louis, Atlanta, Dallas, Baltimore, and Prague symphony orchestras, the Amsterdam Philharmonic, and the Netherlands Chamber Orchestra. Mayer’s Liszt vs. Thalberg ASV Records release was featured as a Recording of the Month in Classic CD Magazine. Mayer is an associate professor of piano at the University of Denver’s Lamont School of Music.

For more information on the “Dvořák in America” institute, call 412-392-8991 or visit www.pittsburghsymphony.org. 

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