About this Artist

KATRINA KRIMSKY, pianist and composer of Russian descent, has developed an individual style blending the various sources of musical knowledge and experience she has absorbed through a lifetime devoted to music. Born and raised in the American South, her musical studies began at a very early age with her mother, an accomplished pianist, and continued at the Eastman School of Music, where she was a student of Cecile Staub Genhart. She received her Bachelor of Music degree in 1959. She traveled in the mid-'60s to the center of contemporary musical activity - Cologne, Germany where she was associated with Karlheinz Stockhausen, Henri Pousseur, Luc Ferrari, and other prominent European composers and she performed recitals of 20th-century piano music. Returning to the States in 1967, she became a performer with the Center of the Creative and Performing Arts Ensemble in Buffalo, NY. As "The Pulse" she performed and recorded Terry Riley's innovative work In C for Columbia Records. She was also associated with many other composers including David Rosenboom, Jon Hassell, David Behrman, and later in New York City with La Monte Young as a member of his Eternal Dream House performing ensemble.

In 1972 she moved to San Francisco establishing herself prominently as pianist, improvising composer, and joined Terry Riley, Pandit Pran Nath, and Robert Ashley on the music faculty of Mills College. Her devotion to and interest in world music, in African-American music, and in contemporary music enhances her own highly developed discipline rooted in the European classical tradition and culminates in her individual style of musical expression as exemplified in her performances and numerous recordings. Krimsky has performed widely in the U.S. and in Europe, and she maintains a presence in both Zurich, Switzerland and San Francisco, California.