Classical IPR recently spoke with collaborative pianist Meredith Stemen.
Click the "Listen" button to hear the full conversation.
An edited transcript of the interview is available below. Content has been edited for length and clarity.
Becoming a collaborative pianist and her journey to Interlochen
Meredith Stemen: I started taking piano lessons when I was five years old. My brother and I started at the same time, and I very quickly learned that I got bored really easily. Even though my brother and I started at the same time, we were in different lesson books. I was always in a lower level of lesson books because I was younger. I found that I was trying to go and play everything out of his books, and I was voraciously consuming all of this music by sight-reading and always wanted to be playing new music. All throughout piano lessons as a student it was that way for me, and eventually in college I realized that there's actually a career field that's really good for people like that [who enjoy sight-reading].
Doing collaborative piano is a really good fit for me. I also joke around that I'm very nosy. It was very fun to get to do collaborative work because you get to just be working with other people. You get to go and play in other people's lessons all the time. It's been fun. I get to learn a little bit about vocal technique, a little bit about brass technique, a little bit about winds, and all these different things.
My brain just didn't really light up doing solo piano and being alone in a practice room all the time. Finding this career field where I was able to just work with other people was really fun and really exciting for me.
I stumbled upon Interlochen as a summer program. I was working here as a staff pianist over the summer a few years back, and really loved it. I had a great time here. An Interlochen Academy alum described it as Disney World for music grad students coming in the summer. I had a similar experience. It’s all of these people coming together from all over the place to enjoy music and have fun doing it and have these nerdy discussions.
I really fell in love with Interlochen that summer and saw this job was posted this past summer [2026], and I decided that I would for sure be applying for it. It was really a whirlwind getting here. Within maybe a month or a month and a half I applied and did the interview process and got the job and moved out here and started. It was really quick, and it sounds cheesy, but it’s very much a dream come true. I'm very happy to be here.
Christy L'Esperance: As a collaborator, how busy are you here at Interlochen? How much music are you learning at any given time?
MS: I came over here [to IPR] directly from playing a voice lesson. I was joking with one of our other collaborative pianists here that it makes me so happy anytime that I get to see them. We both had come downstairs a few minutes early for a voice lesson, and we got three minutes to catch up beforehand. All of our collaborative pianists here at Interlochen are so busy supporting all of the different things that are going on. I get to focus on the voice area, which is really exciting for the other collaborative pianists because that means they are spread a little bit less thin, which is always the problem that we have. We are all so busy. And it's so fun. It's so perfect because I'm never bored, but it is busy.
Solo v. collaborative playing
CL: You've been in Studio A before as a collaborative pianist already with vocal faculty Dr. André Peele and that was wonderful. Do you have a personal preference for one over the other, solo versus collaborative?
MS: All the way up until I started my doctorate I was a solo pianist and was supplementing with collaborative experiences. What I've really found is that all of those other collaborative experiences really inform my solo playing. I don't get the opportunity to play solo as much now, and like I said it does not light up my brain in exactly the same way [as playing collaboratively]. One of the pieces in particular I'm going to do today is actually a Liszt solo piano transcription of an art song. So it's a piece that was originally intended to be performed with a pianist and a singer. Of course, coming into that as a collaborative pianist I'm thinking about what would a singer be doing here? How would they phrase this? Where are they gonna take time for these extra words? They've really informed each other to a point now that they go hand-in-hand really beautifully.
Audience Question: When you are playing as a soloist, are there certain things that you're relieved to not have to take into consideration, like different tempos or just trying to follow whoever you are working with?
MS: I think the biggest thing is you have a lot more responsibility as a soloist, so if anything goes wrong, it's entirely your fault. As a collaborator that can be fun, because if your soloist messes up, then you get to be the hero and save the day. You can say, "I jumped 47 measures and caught you." Whereas if I do that, it's like, "Oh, I just made a mistake." In one way, I'm worrying less about it, and in another way, I'm worrying a lot more about it, because it's all in my hands.
CL: What about memory? You don't normally memorize music when you're a collaborator, but solo, do you always memorize, or do you work with music sometimes?
MS: Typically, yes. I'm playing from my iPad today. Again, a lot of that is just purely logistical. Like we were talking before, the collaborative pianists tend to be really busy. I've described it before as oftentimes I feel like the music is going in my eyeballs and out my fingers because I'm playing so much. There's minimal processing that I really have room to do. I personally have moved away from playing from memory at all. There's a lot of these things, like difficult passages, that I'll memorize just because you have to be able to look down and see what's going on. Typically, for me personally, I'm at a point where I don't memorize as much anymore, just because I play so much music. There's a lot going on in my brain. Prior to switching over to primarily collaborative, I did memorize most of my music, and I hated it.
CL: This might be a little hot button, but I'm gonna ask you about the term collaborative pianist. It's finally starting to overtake the term accompanist. So how do you feel about those terms and their connotations as a pianist?
MS: I personally don't really care that much. I think honestly, my preference a lot of the time is just pianist. I appreciate the idea behind using the term collaborative pianist instead of accompanist. It definitely brings this idea of being an equal partner and bringing equal artistic ability and ideas to the performance. I have my own little small ways that in performance a lot of times I'll demonstrate that. It's usually been, "You need to be in all black and blend in and not be noticed." Sometimes in performances I'll deliberately decide "no, I'm gonna wear a color," or, "I'm going to wear a fancy dress or something very sparkly." I am an equal person here. It's never been something where we are really oppressed to a point where the terminology is a huge deal to me. The thing I think that I prefer to focus on is teaching this culture of respect and treating pianists and people that you're working with, with respect and listening to what they have to say.
On teaching and learning
MS: I've been really lucky in that I've never had a teacher who was trying to put me in a box at all. They were always very good about meeting me where I was, talking to me about what I was trying to achieve, and helping me figure out along the way how to get there. It's been, I think, very centered on self-discovery and self-motivation in a lot of ways.
I've not really had teachers who are going to push me harder than I'm wanting to push myself, which was really valuable for me. I was never somebody who responded well to being pushed hard. My journey was able to unfold very organically and on my own timeline, which I really appreciated and is definitely something I try to bring to my own teaching.
I also really like to encourage students to be honest with themselves. If this is something that they don't really want to do professionally and pursue seriously, that's totally fine. But that means that we're going to be approaching things very differently in lessons and in coaching, versus a student who is really serious about trying to pursue music as a career and is something they want to keep for a lifetime.
The only thing that makes me happier than hearing that somebody is really excited about going to school for music is hearing that they have decided not to go to school for music anymore. I think that's great because that means you're going to be able to continue to love music and keep it in your life in the way that you want to, and you're not gonna try to force yourself to do this thing that's not working for you.
Program notes
"Automne" by Cecil Chaminade: I'm going to start with a concert etude by Cecile Chaminade. It's called Automne which I'm excited about because I grew up in Florida, so being here in Michigan I'm getting to experience my first real fall and autumn weather.
"Die Loreley" by Franz Liszt: Franz Liszt has been a longtime crush of mine- instrumentally. This piece is really fun. I like to play it as a crossover between the collaborative side of me and the solo side, because this is a setting of the art song Die Loreley, which is to a text by German poet, Heinrich Heine. It talks about this pretty significant figure in German mythology, the Loreley. Interestingly enough, Loreley is also the name of this rock along the Rhine River. As you're coming through this passage, you hear sort of this murmuring sound, and it's very echoey and very mysterious. People created this idea of Loreley, who is basically a siren. She's this maiden who sits up on top of this tall rock singing the song, and the sailors get so confused and so enthralled that they crash their boats and perish in the Rhine. You'll hear a lot of it. Liszt is not exactly known for his subtlety. So it should be pretty easy to follow, even without the text, based on the musical ideas.
Music performed in Studio A:
"Automne" by Cecile Chaminade
"Die Loreley" by Franz Liszt
Michael Culler engineered this edition of Studio A. Emma Stadelmann and Siggy Ehrlich edited the digital content.
