Steven Lubin

Steven Lubin (born 1942) is an American pianist and musical scholar. He is best known for his performances on the fortepiano, the early version of the piano.

Studies

Lubin was born in Brooklyn, New York City. He studied piano with Lisa Grad, Nadia Reisenberg, Seymour Lipkin, Rosina Lhévinne and Beveridge Webster, and viola with Florence Nicolaides. He attended New York's High School of Music & Art; graduated from Harvard College, majoring in philosophy; he earned a master's degree in piano at the Juilliard School; and he completed his Ph.D. in musicology at New York University, where he wrote a dissertation entitled Techniques for the Analysis of Development in Middle-Period Beethoven.

In 1987, Decca Records in London engaged Lubin to record and perform the cycle of Beethoven piano concertos on period instruments, in collaboration with the Academy of Ancient Music directed by Christopher Hogwood. These recordings have been reissued by Decca in 2006. In addition to other recordings for Decca, Lubin has made CDs for Harmonia Mundi USA of the complete trios and piano quartets of Mozart, and of Schubert's trios. These recordings were issued by The Mozartean Players in trio format, where Lubin was joined by Stanley Ritchie, violin, and Myron Lutzke, cello. Anca Nicolau is currently the violinist of the trio.

On the modern piano in recent years Lubin has appeared both as a solo recitalist and concerto soloist.

Writings

Lubin writes frequently on musical subjects. In his Ph.D. dissertation (1974), he pointed out that (1) a fruitful way of understanding 18th-century European music follows from the recognition that the composers of that era inhabited a special, abstract, communally shared harmonic space (nowadays sometimes called modulatory space) that existed independently of individual works; (2) that the internal features of this space underwent evolutionary change in the course of the 18th century; (3) that a graphic depiction of this space could be used as a map to trace the various routes composers used to navigate about in their cosmos, and that their designs for these routes constitute an important aspect of the effect and beauty of their large-scale works; and (4) that in the later 18th century, for reasons arising out of the geometry of key-relations employed by composers, their abstract background space took the form of a torus (donut).

Teaching

Lubin has taught at the Juilliard School, Vassar College, Cornell University (where he was head of the theory program) and at Purchase College SUNY), where he is currently a distinguished professor.