Anthony Tan

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

Anthony Tan is a Canadian composer-pianist, electronic musician, and improvisor who draws influence from past experiences as a club DJ, studies in music perception, and training as a classical pianist and concert music composer within the Western European musical tradition. His current artistic research questions the cultural and subjective associations of timbre and, in protest, searches for a more sensory or physiologically based musical aesthetic, often achieved by bending instrumental identity through electronic manipulation.

During his time at the Radcliffe Institute, Tan is composing a new work for quartet and electronics for the Hellqvist/Amaral/Hyde/Bierstone Project and a new percussion quartet with electronics for Architek Percussion, all while he explores performance paradigms as a pianist and improvisor with electronics. In addition, he will be pursuing his theoretical interests in timbre perception and continue work on a book concerning the intersections between psychoacoustics and timbre-orientated composition.

Tan completed his artistic training at the Hochschule für Musik Carl Maria von Weber Dresden. Additionally, he holds a PhD from McGill University, where his research focused on the perception of timbre and its functional use in music. His awards include a Giga-Hertz Förderpreise, a prize at the Internationaler Kompositionswettbewerb der Hamburger Klangwerktage, and the Audience Choice Award and the Generation Jury Prize from the ECM+ Generation 2014 competition. Tan has held residencies at the SWR Experimentalstudio and the Banff Centre.