Concert pianist Oni Buchanan performs an incredible range of piano literature. She specializes in the contemporary works of women composers of the 21st century, with particular focus on the music of Cindy Cox, Mei-Fang Lin, Annie Gosfield, Missy Mazzoli, and Carolyn Yarnell, among many others. In addition, the innate grace and litheness of Ms. Buchanan’s playing makes her a natural interpreter of French music, and her gorgeous performance projects span several centuries, from the miniature keyboard works of François Couperin to the lush expanses of Ravel to the jubilant textures of Messiaen. She also finds exceptional affinity with the polyphonic genius of Bach and Schumann, as well as with the lyrical and percussive mastery of such composers as Prokofiev, Bartók, Stravinsky, and Villa-Lobos.

Oni Buchanan’s concert programming is often interdisciplinary in nature, directly engaging the intimate connections between the arts, and frequently including adventurous contemporary works alongside established repertoire, bringing works from disparate centuries into fascinating and enlightening conversation. Ms. Buchanan has performed solo recitals in major cities throughout the U.S. and abroad, at such U.S. venues as the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Dame Myra Hess Memorial Concerts in Chicago, the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT) in Berkeley, the Galapagos Art Space in NYC, the Lane Series in Burlington, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the Harvard University Hall Concert Series, among many others. She has performed internationally in major South American cities including Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, Brasília, São Paulo, Porto Alegre, and Montevideo, as well as in Canadian cities including Guelph, Waterloo, Thunder Bay, and Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island.

In 2011, Ms. Buchanan joined forces with poet Jon Woodward to begin co-curating large-scale interdisciplinary collaborations. Their first project, “Machines,” featured the machines and films of kinetic sculptor Arthur Ganson played alongside incredible contemporary musical works performed by Ms. Buchanan, Duo Orfeo (guitars), and The Guidonian Hand trombone quartet. Following the success of “Machines,” Ms. Buchanan and Mr. Woodward produced “Four Quartets: Variations,” a project revolving around T. S. Eliot’s inimitable sequence Four Quartets. Moored by the performances of four vocalizing actors and four poets interacting with excerpted and remixed text, the project also featured byways into performance sets by the Bryant Park Quartet, The Guidonian Hand, and Iktus Percussion Quartet, which expanded the musical reaches and correspondences of the poem. In 2012, Ms. Buchanan and Mr. Woodward commissioned a concert-length work for piano/spoken text/electronics from renowned electroacoustic composer John Gibson, which will be premiered in September and performed on tour throughout the 2012/13 season. The piece, called “Uncanny Valley” (after Jon Woodward’s serial poem of the same name), explores the phenomenon of “semantic satiation,” searching through repeated poetic lines and musical forms for what is most uncanny, and most human, in both language and music.

Oni Buchanan is also an award-winning poet. Her third poetry book, Must A Violence, is forthcoming from Kuhl House Poets Series in September 2012, chosen by poet/editor Mark Levine. Her second book of poetry, Spring (University of Illinois Press, 2008), was selected by Mark Doty as a winner of the National Poetry Series, and also received the 2009 Massachusetts Book Award. Her first book, What Animal (UGA Press, 2003), was chosen by Fanny Howe as winner of the University of Georgia Press Contemporary Poetry Series competition. Ms. Buchanan’s poems are featured in many anthologies including The Best American Poetry 2004 and have been published in numerous journals across the country.

Oni Buchanan received her Master’s degree in piano performance from the New England Conservatory of Music, her Bachelor’s degree in music (as well as English) from the University of Virginia, and conducted three years of her music studies at the University of Iowa School of Music while pursuing her M.F.A. in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her teachers have included Russell Sherman, Stephen Drury, Daniel Epstein, Patricia Zander, Uriel Tsachor, and Mimi Tung. In addition, she studied at the Aspen Music Festival in the studios of Joseph Kalichstein and Gabriel Chodos, and has been an active participant and performer in the New England Conservatory Summer Institute for Contemporary Performance Practice (SICPP). Her discography includes three solo piano CDs on the independent Velvet Ear Records label.

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