Live Music Meditation:
Jonathan Biss, Piano

Breathe in sound and silence through guided meditation as you listen to music more viscerally than ever before, meditating to the playing of pianist Jonathan Biss, guided by Matthew Weiner, Associate Dean in the Princeton University Office of Religious Life. This is a FREE, registration-only opportunity to indulge in attentive, focused, and mindful listening. Presented in collaboration with the Institute for Advanced Study.

No prior experience with meditation necessary. Capacity is limited, and we advise participants to arrive early—although the event officially begins at 3PM, doors to the hall will open and meditation instruction will begin at 2:30PM (noon). We advise that you arrive early for this event, as registration is at capacity. The event will conclude by 4PM. For more information about the Live Music Meditation experience, check out this New York Times feature and Performance Today segment. 

Jonathan Biss will return to Princeton University concerts for several events Spring 2024; scroll down to the “Discover More Like This” section on this page for information and tickets.

About the Musician:

Pianist Jonathan Biss is a world-renowned educator and critically acclaimed author who channels his deep musical curiosity into expansive performances and projects in the concert hall and beyond. Praised for his “impeccable taste and a formidable technique” (The New Yorker), Biss has appeared internationally as a soloist with the Los Angeles and New York Philharmonics, the Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco Symphonies, and the Cleveland and Philadelphia Orchestras as well as the London Philharmonic, the Royal Concertgebouw, the Philharmonia, and Gewandhausorchester Leipzig, among many other ensembles. Biss is a teacher, musical thinker, and a performer whose repertoire ranges from the core canon to contemporary commissions. He is Co-Artistic Director alongside Mitsuko Uchida at the Marlboro Music Festival, where he has spent fifteen summers.

Coinciding with the 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth in 2020, Biss recorded the composer’s complete piano sonatas, and offered insights to all 32-landmark works via his free, online Coursera lecture series Exploring Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas. In March 2020, Biss gave a virtual recital presented by 92NY, wherein he performed Beethoven’s last three piano sonatas for an online audience of more than 280,000 people. That year, Biss released his fourth book, UNQUIET: My Life with Beethoven (2020), the first Audible Original by a classical musician and one of Audible’s top audiobooks of 2020.

Biss is the recipient of numerous honours, including the Leonard Bernstein Award, the Andrew Wolf Memorial Chamber Music Award, an Avery Fisher Career Grant, the Borletti-Buitoni Trust Award, and a Gilmore Young Artist Award. His albums for EMI won the Diapason d’Or de l’Année and Edison awards. He was an artist-in-residence on American Public Media’s Performance Today and was the first American chosen to participate in the BBC’s New Generation Artist program. He is also on the piano faculty of the New England Conservatory.

Biss is a third-generation professional musician; his grandmother is Raya Garbousova, one of the first famous female cellists (for whom Samuel Barber composed his Cello Concerto), and his parents are violinist Miriam Fried and violist/violinist Paul Biss. Growing up surrounded by music, Biss began his piano studies at age six, with his first musical collaborations alongside his mother and father. He studied with Evelyne Brancart at Indiana University and Leon Fleisher at the Curtis Institute of Music.