The Author


STEPHEN SIEK is the author of England's Piano Sage: The Life and Teachings of Tobias Matthay, published by Scarecrow Press in 2012, and of A Dictionary for the Modern Pianist, published by Rowman & Littlefield in November of 2016. He has concertized extensively throughout North America, and he made his London debut in 1988. He released an acclaimed recording of The Philadelphia Sonatas of Alexander Reinagle (c. 1750-1809) on the Titanic label in 1998, and he has presented numerous concerts and lectures throughout America for organizations such as the Historical Keyboard Society of America, the American Liszt Society, and the Society for American Music. His numerous articles have appeared in such journals as the American Music Teacher, the Piano Quarterly, the Piano Journal of the European Piano Teachers Association, and International Piano. A widely recognized scholar of American music, Siek presented new research concerning musical figures active in post-revolutionary Philadelphia in the summer 1993 issue of American Music, and he is also a contributor to the Revised New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, as well as the new edition of the Grove Dictionary of American Music. His other scholarly writings have included pieces for the American Musical Instrument Society Journal and Symposium (the journal of the College Music Society).

Considered an authority on the work of British pedagogue Tobias Matthay, from 1998 to 2002 Siek served as President of the American Matthay Association, and he has recently annotated five of the titles in the seven-part Matthay Pupils series for APR Records. Other CD annotation projects include several discs for Australia's Universal Eloquence label, including the first modern reissue of Moura Lympany's 1941-42 Decca recordings of the complete Rachmaninoff Preludes. He also annotated Garrick Ohlsson's highly praised disc of the solo works of Charles Tomlinson Griffes for Hyperion, as well as Four Worlds, the debut disc of the brilliant Chinese pianist Moye Chen for Deutsch Grammophon. Siek has lectured at Yale University and the University of Nottingham, and in 2015 he performed at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland in Glasgow for the Tenth Biennial International Conference on Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain. He holds bachelor of music and master of music degrees in piano from the University of Maryland, where he studied with Stewart Gordon. His additional piano studies were undertaken with Donald Hageman, Frank Mannheimer, and Denise Lassimonne. He holds a Ph.D. in musicology from the College-Conservatory of Music at the University of Cincinnati, and for many years he served as a professor of music at Wittenberg University in Ohio. Currently living in Tempe, Arizona, he now serves as a Faculty Associate at Arizona State University. In March of 2019, Stephen Siek was named an Honorary Associate of London's Royal Academy of Music, an award given to recognize employees or friends of the Academy who have made a special contribution to the institution.