About

Pianist-scholar-curator Mike Cheng-Yu Lee is one of a new generation of performers on historical pianos that span the 18th to early 20th centuries. His performances have garnered attention for their fresh perspectives and boldness of ideas. For his debut recital in Australia he received a coveted five-star review in Limelight Magazine: “Try as one might, it was hard to avoid cliché responses like ‘stunning’, even ‘electrifying’...I heard things in Mozart’s music I had never thought possible and certainly had never encountered before.”

Awarded Second and Audience prizes at the inaugural Westfield International Fortepiano Competition by a jury that included the late Christopher Hogwood and Robert Levin, Mike has performed in notable venues across the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand, and Taiwan. Integrating performance traditions, he has collaborated equally with modern and historical performers such as Michael Tilson Thomas, musicians from the Juilliard, Formosa, and Aizuri quartets, Francisco Fullana (recipient of the Avery Fisher Career Grant), Clancy Newman (winner of the Walter W. Naumburg Competition), Zvi Plesser (Jerusalem Academy of Music; Juilliard School), Cynthia Roberts (concertmaster Les Arts Florissants; Juilliard School), Aisslinn Nosky (concertmaster Handel and Haydn Society), Tatiana Samouil (Chapelle Musicale Reine Elisabeth), among others.

In recent years, Mike has assumed the directorship and curatorship of important instrument collections. In 2017-19 he was Director of the Australian National University Keyboard Institute, overseeing the curricular application, outreach, and maintenance of the southern hemisphere's largest collection of historical pianos. From 2020-23 Mike was Artist-in-Residence at the Cornell Center for Historical Keyboards where he developed interdisciplinary artistic and educational programs in a research university setting. These include international conference-festivals, symposia, academies, and launching the Salon Project in partnership with the Cornell Society for the Humanities that brings together music, instruments, research, and conversation. Additionally Mike taught into Cornell's DMA program, curated its collection of historical pianos, and served as Artistic Director of the Cornell-Westfield FortePiano Summer Academy. Over the years he has had the privilege to work with eminent instrument builders such as Rodney Regier, Thomas and Barbara Wolf, and Paul McNulty.

A passionate educator, Mike frequently gives performances and masterclasses at some of the world's most renowned institutions and schools. Recent invitations include the Fryderyk Chopin Institute-Warsaw as artist-faculty at its 2023 US Masterclasses, the Smithsonian Institution Academy, the New World Symphony, the Curtis Institute, Royal Academy of Music, New England Conservatory, Cleveland Institute of Music, Oberlin Conservatory, University of Southern California, UCLA, Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts, etc. Pianists he has coached have been finalists at the Brugges MA PianoForte Competition. Mike has also collaborated with ToneBase – the leading online learning platform – to introduce period pianos and their performing practices to its more than 8000 global subscribers.

As a scholar, Mike's research lies at the various intersections within performance studies: music theory, analysis-and-performance, performance practice, embodiment, philosophies of mind and action, organology. He has served as full-time Visiting Assistant Professor at the Eastman School of Music and Indiana University–Bloomington and his articles have appeared in journals such as 19th-Century Music (embodiment, autograph studies, hermeneutics in Chopin), Music Theory Online (Formenlehre, Schenker, historical meter in Schubert), Early Music America Magazine (a feature on period pianos and their present-day makers). As a Mellon Foundation grant recipient, his conference presentations – at Society for Music Theory, European Music Analysis Congress, Society for Music Analysis, etc. – have additionally engaged topics that range from schema theory and historical agency in Haydn quartets to exploring the applicability of Klumpenhouwer Networks to tonal structures.

After studies with Boris Berman at the Yale School of Music and graduate coursework in music theory at the Yale Department of Music, Mike worked with Malcolm Bilson at Cornell. He holds a Ph.D. in Musicology with a dissertation theorizing musical embodiment from an analytic philosophical tradition that was awarded Cornell's Donald J. Grout Memorial Dissertation Prize. His other major teachers include Michael Friedmann and the Haydn scholar James Webster.