150 Word and Brief Bio | Long Bio | Longer Bio | Bio for Young Audiences
“Every city has at least one. Everybody knows at least one. They’re the dynamic players who bring your hometown scene to life and make it what it is—and you’re just certain that if everyone everywhere knew about them, they’d be world-famous.
World, meet Sarah Bob…she’s been That Player in Boston. The one who not only advocates for new music, but also makes it happen. The one who plays the local composers not only because they’re local, but because they’re damn well worth playing…Sarah Bob—she’s a superstar. Spread the word.”
Steve Smith of National Sawdust, September 2019
150 Word Bio
Pianist Sarah Bob, hailed as “sumptuous and eloquent” (Boston Globe) and that “dynamic player…superstar” (National Sawdust), is a soloist and chamber musician noted for her charismatic performances, colorful playing and diverse programming. The goal, her strong suit, is to introduce music in a loving, inclusive, and intoxicating way.
Sarah is founding director of New Gallery Concert Series, a combination of new music and new visual art along with their creators, and Nasty Cooperative, dialogue driven artistic events created to build community and raise funds for organizations in need.
Her accolades include top prizewinner of Holland’s International Gaudeamus Competition, New England Conservatory’s Outstanding Alumni Award, and instant world-wide acclaim for her most recent solo album …nobody move…. She is an original and active member of Radius Ensemble and Primary Duo, maintains a private studio, and is on faculty at Longy School of Music of Bard College. More information: www.sarahbob.net.
Brief Bio
Pianist Sarah Bob, hailed as “sumptuous and eloquent” by the Boston Globe and that “dynamic player…superstar” by National Sawdust, is an active soloist and chamber musician noted for her charismatic performances, colorful playing and diverse programming. Considered a “trailblazer when it comes to championing the works of modern composers and combining art media in the process…” (Northeast Performer), she is founding director of the New Gallery Concert Series, a series that combines new music and new visual art along with their creators. The goal, her strong suit, is to introduce music in a loving, inclusive, and intoxicating way.Inspired by current events, she is also the creator of The Nasty Cooperative: numerous dialogue driven artistic events created to build community and help raise funds for organizations in need.
Sarah is an original and active member of Radius Ensemble and Primary Duo, and is a frequent performing artist with the esteemed Castle of Our Skins. Her accolades as a performer and director range from top prizewinner of Holland’s International Gaudeamus Competition to New England Conservatory’s Outstanding Alumni Award. Her most recent solo album, …nobody move… Commissions and Premieres for the New Gallery Concert Series, instantly received international acclaim, earning a place on the Boston Globe’s best of classical recordings list and ALBUM OF THE WEEK in National Sawdust among other accolades. Past roles include pianist of the Firebird Ensemble, Director of Classical Music at the Stone Mountain Arts Center, 2019 Artist in Residence of The Music Mansion which won the 2019 Dorry Award for “Best Performance Series” during her time as curator, contributor to SONUS: A Journal of Investigation into Global Musical Possibilities, and arranger of an upcoming publication available through Carl Fischer Publishing of her solo piano rendition of Lee Hyla’s “My Life on the Plains.” Sarah holds degrees from the University of Michigan School of Music and the New England Conservatory, maintains her own private studio, and teaches “The Power of Art” and “Alternative Space” courses as faculty at the Longy School of Music of Bard College. For more information, please go to www.sarahbob.net.
Long Bio
Hailed as “sumptuous and eloquent” by the Boston Globe and that “dynamic player…superstar” by National Sawdust, pianist Sarah Bob is an active soloist and chamber musician noted for her charismatic performances, colorful playing and diverse programming. A strong advocate for new music and considered a “trailblazer when it comes to championing the works of modern composers and combining art media in the process…” (Northeast Performer), she is the founding director of the New Gallery Concert Series, a series devoted to commissioning and uniting new music and contemporary visual art with their creators. The goal, her strong suit, is to introduce music in a loving, inclusive, and intoxicating way. Inspired by current events, she is also the creator of The Nasty Cooperative: numerous dialogue driven artistic events created to build community, help raise funds for organizations in need, and encourage others to do the same.
Her most recent solo album, …nobody move… Commissions and Premieres for the New Gallery Concert Series, received international acclaim, earning a place on the Boston Globe’s best of classical recordings list and ALBUM OF THE WEEK in National Sawdust among other accolades. According to AllMusic, …nobody move… also exemplifies Sarah as “…pianist as curator, which is a different thing from simply selecting a program for a recording… the program, despite its variety, has a unique coherence forged by Bob’s mixture of technical control and a certain verve and humor…One finishes the album interested in what Bob and other pianists may do with this concept in the future.”
Sarah is an original member of ensembles including her piano/percussion group, Primary Duo, and Radius Ensemble, a chamber music collective that presents both the traditional and cutting edge, and is currently a frequent performing artist with the esteemed Castle of Our Skins, a celebration of Black artistry.
Recognized as a risk taker and cited for an “ideal combination of all-stops-out abandon and sure-footed technical control” by 21st Century Music, she is top prizewinner of the International Gaudeamus Competition 2001 and grant recipient of the Yvar Mikhashoff Trust for New Music. Sarah was featured as one of Boston’s Most Inspiring Stories in the Boston Voyager and maintains other accolades including Outstanding Alumni Award from the New England Conservatory of Music, the St. Botolph Club Foundation’s Grant-in-Aid Award, an honor that recognizes the quality of her work and artistic merit, the first annual John Kleshinski Award in honor of her daring, exciting and high quality New Gallery Concert Series presentations, a successful three year fellowship at the prestigious St. Botolph Club, and funding from the Trust for Mutual Understanding that brought her to Sofia, Bulgaria and Berlin, Germany to present and perform music by living American composers.
Sarah can be heard playing music on Tzadik, Albany Records, Cauchemar, NLM Records, BMOP/sound label, collaborations as featured pianist, chamber musician, and orchestral player with the Boston Modern Orchestra Project on New World and Oxingale Records, Ludovico Ensemble Edition, Neuma Records, New Focus Records, and Radius Ensemble, and Avie Records, where one album was recognized as one of best classical recordings of 2016 by The ARTery and …nobody move…, her solo piano album, as one of “The Boston Area’s best classical recordings for 2019″ by the Boston Globe.
Past roles include original member and pianist of the Firebird Ensemble, Director of Classical Music at the Stone Mountain Arts Center in Brownfield, Maine, 2019 Artist in Residence of The Music Mansion which won the 2019 Dorry Award for “Best Performance Series” during her time as curator, contributor to SONUS: A Journal of Investigation into Global Musical Possibilities, and, with the composer’s blessing, arranger of her solo piano rendition of Lee Hyla’s “My Life on the Plains” coming soon through Carl Fischer Publishing. Sarah maintains a private studio and teaches “The Power of Art” and “Alternative Space” courses as faculty at the Longy School of Music of Bard College. For more information, please go to www.sarahbob.net.
Longer Bio
Hailed as “sumptuous and eloquent” by the Boston Globe and that “dynamic player…superstar” by National Sawdust, pianist Sarah Bob is an active soloist and chamber musician noted for her charismatic performances, colorful playing and diverse programming. A strong advocate for new music and considered a “trailblazer when it comes to championing the works of modern composers and combining art media in the process…” (Northeast Performer), she is also the founding director of the New Gallery Concert Series, a series devoted to commissioning and uniting new music and contemporary visual art with their creators. The goal, her strong suit, is to introduce music in a loving, inclusive, and intoxicating way. She is an active and original member of ensembles including what the Boston Music Intelligencer calls the “knockout” piano/percussion group Primary Duo, and Radius Ensemble, a fresh and creative chamber music collective that focuses on both the traditional and cutting edge. Sarah was the original pianist of the Firebird Ensemble, considered “ambitious and eclectic” by the New York Times, and is currently a frequent performing artist with the esteemed Castle of Our Skins, a celebration of Black artistry.
Inspired by current events and a strong conviction for justice, Sarah is the creator of The Nasty Cooperative: numerous dialogue driven artistic events created to build community, help raise funds for organizations in need, and encourage others to do the same. The Nasty Cooperative is a completely volunteer initiative and ALL proceeds are donated.
Sarah’s work has been celebrated nationwide as well as overseas with performances in a variety of venues including New York City’s Carnegie Hall, Symphony Space, the Tenri Cultural Institute, the Apollo Theater, Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Boston’s own Jordan Hall, Goethe Institute, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, St. Botolph Club, Institute of Contemporary Art, Tsai Center, Boston Esplanade Hatch Shell, Rockport’s Shalin Liu Performance Center, as well as the Kerrytown Concert House (Ann Arbor, Michigan), the Stone Mountain Arts Center (Brownfield, Maine), the National Gallery of Art (Washington D.C.), Pianoforte Studios (Chicago), Pritzger Auditorium at at the Harold Washington Chicago Public Library, VMA Arts and Cultural Center and the Music Mansion (Providence, R.I.), The Music Hall (Portsmouth, N.H.), The Chan Centre (Vancouver, B.C.), De Doelen (Rotterdam, Holland), Music Center Boris Hristov (Sofia, Bulgaria), UnerhörteMusik Concert Series (Berlin, Germany) and the Dampfzentrale (Bern, Switzerland.) Thanks to her drive, Sarah is also cited in Beyond Talent: Creating a Successful Career in Music by Angela Myles Beeching and she was featured as one of Boston’s Most Inspiring Stories in the Boston Voyager.
Recognized as a risk taker and cited for an “ideal combination of all-stops-out abandon and sure-footed technical control” by 21st Century Music, Sarah is top prizewinner of the International Gaudeamus Interpreters Competition 2001 and grant recipient of the Yvar Mikhashoff Trust for New Music. She is the recipient of the St. Botolph Club Foundation’s 2005 Grant-in-Aid Award which recognizes the quality of her work and artistic merit and, in 2007, received the first annual John Kleshinski Award in honor of her daring, exciting and high quality New Gallery Concert Series presentations. In 2009, only ten years after graduation, Sarah received the prestigious Outstanding Alumni Award from the New England Conservatory. On behalf of the New Gallery Concert Series, she has also consistently earned the Aaron Copland Fund along with the New England Foundation for the Arts/Meet the Composer, and the Argosy Foundation Contemporary Music Fund, support from the Boston Cultural Council, the Amphion Foundation, and also the Trust for Mutual Understanding which brought her to Eastern Europe to bring American contemporary music to Sofia, Bulgaria.
Sarah wears many hats and finds that her collaborations go beyond chamber music, orchestral playing, leading organizations, working with visual artists, and composers. She is the first musician ever to be invited to give a concert-lecture on the esteemed Fine Arts Humanities & Social Sciences Speaker Series at UMass-Lowell. Her success in pivoting to virtual events during the pandemic on behalf of her New Gallery Concert Series has made a real mark on the media, as unique, exciting, and “impossible to turn away, as my screen captivated me in a way I hadn’t quite experienced before.” (Markus Knoke of WHRB.) Also as Director of the New Gallery Concert Series, Sarah annually co-produces the week-long Young Composers Festival every winter with the Community Music Center of Boston and, in years past, the Dinosaur Annex Music Ensemble as well.
As a fan of kids and the arts and on behalf of the Nashua Symphony Orchestra “Once Upon A Time” Solo and Chamber Music Series, Sarah has also organized and performed new music concerts for young children. As for older youth, Sarah has been a guest artist with the Sarasa Ensemble and participated in multiple outreach programs performing for and working with incarcerated teens.
In 2008, Sarah was flown to Switzerland specifically to perform as piano soloist with the Swiss dance troupe inFlux under choreographer Lucía Baumgartner. Sarah served as Classical Music Director of the Stone Mountain Arts Center to program, perform and bring in the highest quality of musicians. She also served as the 2019 Artist in Residence at The Music Mansion in Providence that won the 2019 Dorry Award for best “Performing Art Series” during her time as curator. Past roles also include contributor to SONUS: A Journal of Investigation into Global Musical Possibilities and as a three year appointed Fellow at the St. Botolph Club.
Sarah has had the pleasure of working with poets and mime and, with permission from the composer, arranging My Life on the Plains by Lee Hyla for solo piano to great acclaim. “To its everlasting credit, this rendition [of My Life on the Plains] does not sound like excerpts: Hyla/Bob makes a compelling argument of its own, calling forth a variety of touches and techniques.” (Boston Music Intelligencer September 2014.) It will be available through Carl Fischer Publishing and is also featured on her album, …nobody move…Commissions and Premieres for the New Gallery Concert Series on Avie Records.
Sarah is the one who “…not only advocates for new music, but also makes it happen…who plays the local composers not only because they’re local, but because they’re damn well worth playing…” (Steve Smith, National Sawdust) has worked with and premiered countless works by both established and emerging composers from Gunther Schuller and Lee Hyla to Curtis K. Hughes and Jonathan Bailey Holland. By special request, she has also performed for artists John Zorn (sponsored by New England Conservatory’s Jazz Studies and Contemporary Improvisation Department), Kaija Saariaho (sponsored by the Boston Symphony Orchestra/New England Conservatory), Franco Donatoni (through the New England Conservatory/Harvard Callithumpian Consort Series), Lee Hyla, John Harbison, Donald Martino, John Heiss, Michael Gandolfi, Jon Deak, Vanessa Lann, Louis Goldstein, Lukas Foss, Lior Navok, Steffen Schleirmacher and more. Her special attention to music of today includes performances with the Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP), Dinosaur Annex, Callithumpian Consort, Boston’s Microtonal Society: NotaRiotous, Beat City Art Ensemble, Alea III, Lumen Contemporary Music Ensemble, Warebrook Contemporary Music Festival, Rockport Chamber Music Festival, Kadence Arts, HERENOW new music festival (Bulgaria), the Composers Out Front series sponsored by the American Composers Orchestra, as both soloist and panelist, New Music Gathering (2018/2020) again as both soloist and panelist, and, with the highest acclaim given by Pozzi Escot, composer of Piano Concerto, the Soria Chamber Players. Sarah has multiple times been the featured soloist with Boston Musica Viva on the Fleet Boston Celebrity Series and has also shared the concert stage with performers that include sopranos Lucy Shelton, Lisa Saffer and Diana Hoagland, the Borromeo String Quartet, saxophonist Kenneth Radnofsky, violinists James Buswell and Irina Muresanu, Ann Arbor’s Phoenix Ensemble, Maestros Frank Batisti, Robert Kapilow, and Robert Page, clarinetist Richard Stolzman, cellist Lawrence Lesser, flutists Fenwick Smith and Bonita Boyd and the Stone Mountain Boys. Sarah also performs on the First Monday Concert Series, Composers’ Series, Enchanted Circle Contemporary Ensemble, Brandeis New Music, the Summer Institute for Contemporary Piano and Percussion, BMOP’s Club Cafe solo/chamber music series, the Craftsbury Chamber Players and New Music Gathering. Radio appearances as a performer and interviewee, both live and prerecorded, include Boston’s WGBH, NPR’s All Things Considered, “Not Brahms and Liszt” on Cambridge’s WMBR, Columbus, Ohio’s WBCE ,VPRO-Dutch radio, Italy’s Radio Gamma Gioiosa, Germany’s Bayerischer Rundfunk, Dublin’s RTE lyric fm and more including stations in Israel, New Zealand, Canada and Hungary.
Sarah’s most recent solo album on Avie Records, …nobody move… Commissions and Premieres for the New Gallery Concert Series, received international acclaim, earning a place on the Boston Globe’s best of classical recordings list and ALBUM OF THE WEEK in National Sawdust among other accolades. According to AllMusic, …nobody move… also exemplifies Sarah as “…pianist as curator, which is a different thing from simply selecting a program for a recording… the program, despite its variety, has a unique coherence forged by Bob’s mixture of technical control and a certain verve and humor…One finishes the album interested in what Bob and other pianists may do with this concept in the future.” Along with visual art by past NGCS participants, Sarah’s compilation of solo piano pieces is “a striking album that ranges from in-your-face to contemplative moods, entertaining the ears of contemporary music lovers and novices alike” and “as arresting as its title suggests!” She can also be heard playing the music of Lee Hyla on the Tzadik label, Curtis K. Hughes on Cauchemar Records and New Focus Records, solo piano by Lior Navok on NLM Records, solo and chamber music by Elena Ruehr on Albany Records and Avie Records (one of which was recognized as one of the best classical recordings of 2016 by WBUR’s The ARTery), Armand Qualliotine on Neptune Music Co., Claude Vivier with violinist Biliana Voutchkova on her CD faces, Cordis on its debut pop album Here On Out by Richard Grimes, solo piano by Lisa Bielawa on the BMOP/sound label, music by Donald Crockett with the Firebird Ensemble on New World Records, chamber music by Eric Moe on BMOP/sound label, collaborations as featured pianist, chamber musician, and orchestral player with BMOP on New World and Oxingale Records, Mischa Salkind-Pearl’s I Might Be Wrong, Radius Ensemble’s first album Fresh Paint, and David Rakowski’s Stolen Moments, as featured performer on the title work, chamber music by Aaron Jay Myers on Neuma Records. More albums in the works and coming out soon.
Sarah graduated with honors from the University of Michigan School of Music and soon after received her masters from the New England Conservatory (NEC.) Her principal teachers include Steven Masi at the Manhattan School of Music Preparatory Division, Dr. Louis Nagel (UM), Stephen Drury (NEC), and mad props to her very first piano teacher ever, Marilyn Arons. She worked extensively with both pianist Patricia Zander and violinist Malcolm Lowe, former concertmaster of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, as a member of the 1998-1999 NEC Honors Piano Trio. Sarah, originally from Teaneck, New Jersey, has served as adjunct faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Department of Music, the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA, PhoenxPhest! in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and at the Community Music Center of Boston. Presently, Sarah resides in Boston with her family, maintains her own private studio, and teaches courses on “The Power of Art” and “Alternative Spaces” as faculty at the Longy School of Music of Bard College. She loves dark chocolate, flowers, good books, deep massage, Zumba, her percussionist/composer husband, Aaron Trant, and their sweet, adorable children and dog. For more information, please go to www.sarahbob.net.
Bio for Young Audiences
Sarah Bob originally hails from Teaneck, N.J., which, amazingly enough, is also the home of Sesame Street’s “Bob” and the place where Sarah’s childhood infatuation with sharing the BOB name with Bob McGrath began. After starting piano lessons in the 3rd grade, Sarah not only became known as a brilliant pianist, but also as a girl who runs exactly like the character “Laura Ingalls” from the beloved family show, Little House on the Prairie. Sarah, now living in Jamaica Plain, M.A., is in charge of putting new music concerts together with new visual art in Boston and calls the events the New Gallery Concert Series. She also plays with other musicians in lots of groups like the Radius Ensemble, and, with her percussionist husband, Primary Duo. Sarah loves to play concerts, from Carnegie Hall in New York City to De Doelen in Holland, making albums (check out …nobody move…, it is her alone playing music by her friends!), and also teaches private piano lessons to grown ups and little kids. Eventually, Sarah did meet Bob McGrath (she has the picture to prove it!) and while dark chocolate, dogs, and flowers are only three of Sarah’s favorite things, you can learn more about her on her website: www.sarahbob.net.