About
Cheryl Tan is a pianist, fortepianist, researcher, and lecturer specialising in keyboard music of the long nineteenth century. She holds a Doctor of Musical Arts from Cornell University, where she studied historical keyboards 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. Cheryl previously studied in Britain, graduating from the University of Oxford with First Class Honours (BA Music) and the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama with Distinction (MMus Piano Performance).
Cheryl joined the University of Southampton in 2024 as a Part-Time Lecturer in Piano. She is also a Senior Associate Teacher at the University of Bristol and a Visiting Tutor at the University of Oxford, teaching across performance and academic disciplines. Her research focuses on historical performance practice, postclassical concert culture, music analysis, and the music of women composers, particularly Clara Wieck-Schumann and her circles.
In September 2025, Cheryl was awarded a one-year Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellowship at Trinity College Dublin. Her project, Revisiting Clara Wieck-Schumann: Virtuosity, Identity, and Lost Repertory, examines nineteenth-century virtuosity at the intersection of performance, analysis, and historical-cultural study. She has presented guest lectures, conference papers, recitals, and lecture-recitals internationally on both modern and historical pianos.
Shaped by her experiences as a pianist and scholar, Cheryl’s research into lost pianistic traditions and the works of women composers seeks to bring scholarship and practice into mutually illuminating dialogue, engaging audiences through performance, research-led programming, and educational initiatives across the UK and Ireland.