University of Michigan Department of Piano

So excited to see this out in the world! 🎹 Piano Lab Pro premieres Thursday, August 27 at Britton Recital Hall — a demonstration, a look at the research, and the chance to see what our students will be working with this fall. Free and open to all; hope you can join us! Details and registration below 👇

Piano Lab Pro: The Science of Stage Presence - University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre & Dance Piano Lab Pro: The Science of Stage Presence Immersive tools that help musicians understand and manage performance anxiety – now entering the University of Michigan class piano curriculum. Piano Lab Pro is a new Apple Vision Pro app that lets pianists face the pressure of performing before it ever...

Congratulations to Hyae-jin Hwang ('16, DMA in Piano Pedagogy and Performance) on her new role at Texas Music Teachers Association!

Our recent piano alumni are amongst the 2026 MTNA Awards Recipients! Congratulations!
🎹🎊Jacob Wang (BM in Piano Performance, MM in Pedagogy and Performance) - Stecher & Horowitz Foundation - MTNA Melvin Stecher and Norman Horowitz Career Grant
🎹🎉 Katherine Benson ('23 DMA in Piano Performance) - Stecher & Horowitz Foundation - MTNA Gateway Prize for Advancement in the Arts

Read more about Jacob and Katherine in the complete listing of the Awards Recipients below:
https://www.mtna.org/2026_Recipients.html

Congratulations to Mira Walker ('26 DMA in Piano Pedagogy and Performance) on her new appointment! We are so excited for Mira about her next chapter!

Huge congratulations to Taylor Flowers (‘21 DMA in Collaborative Piano) on his appointment! We are so excited for Taylor about this new chapter!

We are delighted to welcome Dr. Taylor Flowers to the Georgia State University School of Music as Lecturer in Collaborative Piano — and to share some exciting news alongside his arrival!

Dr. Flowers joins us following concurrent appointments at Hillsdale College and the University of Michigan, bringing an international performance profile, a deep specialization in the repertoire of the African diaspora and the 2026 George Shirley Collaborative Pianist Award. He will also help us launch our new Master of Music in Collaborative Piano, set to welcome its first students in fall 2027.

As Dr. Flowers puts it: “I will encourage my students to define a purpose for their artistic expression, to develop technical excellence in their craft and to live their lives in harmony with the richly beautiful music they seek to create.”

Learn more about Dr. Flowers and what’s ahead for collaborative piano at GSU: https://t.gsu.edu/3SSDzku

Congratulations to SMTD alum Matthew Thompson ('10 DMA in Collaborative Piano) on his impactful and ongoing research and performance initiatives on Korean Art Songs!

For SMTD Piano Alum, Immersion in the Gershwin Initiative Leads to Prestigious Prizes - University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre & Dance The activities of the Gershwin Initiative, an ongoing partnership between the University of Michigan and the Gershwin estate, are multifaceted, involving many aspects of SMTD. Comprehensive in scope, the initiative fundamentally blends the abstract with the practical, cutting-edge scholarship with w...