Schoenberg performs spontaneously improvised works and yet each one has the polish, sophistication, and technical mastery of a complex piece of music.

David Sokol, Music Editor, Advocate Newspapers

• Steven Schoenberg — piano

Steven Schoenberg is a dynamic, award-winning composer/pianist whose talents cross into musical theater, classical compositions, film scoring, children’s music, and solo improvisational piano performances. His acclaimed recordings, Pianoworks, Three Days in May, Steven Schoenberg Live: An Improvisational Journey, Christmas Reimagined, What’s Going On?, and his newest, Steven Schoenberg — Concerts Volume 1, 1990 to 2012 (released in 2021) are available for purchase.

Steven regularly performs improvisational piano concerts and has appeared at concert halls throughout the United States. His recent scores include the HBO documentary Monica and David, winner of the Best Documentary Feature at the 2010 Tribeca Film Festival; A Class Apart, for the PBS series American Experience; An Act of Conscience, for Showtime; and Farmingville, which opened the 2005 PBS series POV. Farmingville took home the Special Jury Award from the Sundance Film Festival. Schoenberg has scored numerous Emmy Award-winning films for other PBS series including NOVA and the BBC. Schoenberg also scored the feature film Graceland, with his son Adam Schoenberg, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival (2012).

A concert by Steven Schoenberg is like almost nothing else in music. Others can improvise in performance, but very few can improvise over so wide a range of musical forms as those with which Schoenberg is in touch.

John Stiffler, Hampshire Life

For children’s television, he has composed songs for Sesame Street and scored films for ZOOM and the Children’s Television Workshop. Other children’s projects include the Emmy Award-winning Kid Quest and composing music for the award-winning book and CD My Bodyworks, written by his wife Jane Schoenberg. He is currently writing Dear Edvard, a music-theatre piece with Richard Michelson.

More Praise for Steven Schoenberg

Steven Schoenberg’s kaleidoscopic piano speaks with a uniquely American voice. His flowing compositions, laced with stride, folk, modern jazz, and impressionistic styles, burst open into full-scale musical dioramas.

Tom Regan, Prairie Public Radio

Schoenberg’s Three Days in May (Quabbin Records) is worth the effort. It’s an eloquent, lush, and flowing series of improvisations that are spliced together to form sequential states of mind. He claims that the performances are completely spontaneous, and if that’s so, they are within strict melodic and rhythmic frameworks.

DownBeat Magazine

More than a small musical miracle occurred in Amherst College’s Buckley Recital Hall last night. Steven Schoenberg held more than 500 people spellbound for 90 minutes with a mix of artistry and understated spirituality. Schoenberg’s concert wove together styles as different as classical, popular, and blues into a highly original fabric that is warmly familiar. His versatility and extraordinary musicianship allow him to evoke classical music one minute and the spirit of an off-Broadway passion play the next.

Rob Okun, Daily Hampshire Gazette

Schoenberg is a bright composer, and his sparkling album Pianoworks is almost 45 minutes of Schoenberg’s solo improvisations, most of them from a concert he gave at Amherst College. He’s a lyrical player with a gift for delicate interlocking melodies and extended single-note runs high up the keyboard.

Ray Murphy, Boston Globe

• Steven Schoenberg’s website
• Steven Schoenberg on All About Jazz
• Steven Schoenberg on Facebook