Cheryl Tan

Cheryl Tan is a pianist, fortepianist, researcher, and lecturer specialising in keyboard culture of the long nineteenth century. She joined the University of Bristol in 2025 as a Senior Associate Teacher in Piano. She was awarded a Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at Trinity College Dublin, where her project, Revisiting Clara Wieck-Schumann: Virtuosity, Identity, and Lost Repertory, examines nineteenth-century virtuosity at the intersection of performance, musical analysis, and historical-cultural study.

Cheryl holds a doctorate from Cornell University, where she studied historical performance practice with Malcolm Bilson and completed her dissertation, Clara Wieck and her Piano Variations: Postclassical Pianism of the 1830s, under the supervision of James Webster, Roger Moseley, Natasha Loges, and Xak Bjerken. She previously graduated from the University of Oxford with First Class (BA Music) and the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama with Distinction (MMus Piano Performance). Her principal teachers have included Malcolm Bilson, Xak Bjerken, John Byrne, Victor Sangiorgio, and Michael Young.

Alongside her work at Bristol, Cheryl teaches across academic and performance disciplines at the Universities of Oxford and Southampton. Her teaching is shaped by her work as a pianist and scholar, integrating artistic practice and research to explore overlooked pianistic traditions and the music of women composers. She has presented guest lectures, conference papers, recitals, and lecture-recitals internationally on both modern and historical pianos, with her research appearing in Nineteenth-Century Music Review and Music Analysis. In February 2026, she founded and convened the international symposium Rediscovering Celtic Heritage: Musical Legacies across the Irish Sea. As a member of the Wales-based Glamorgan Duo, she continues to develop research-led performance and educational initiatives through collaborative projects across the UK and Ireland.