My Friends on the Web

Here are links to some friends with web pages, organized in alphabetical order by last name.

Aaron Berkowitz
Aaron was the most talented of my early piano students; I still remember well his recital of Schumann, Brahms, and Liszt. Although on the brink of becoming a doctor, he is currently pursuing an impressively diverse curriculum at Harvard's music department, including ethnomusicology, sitar playing, and composition. Refer to his website for more details.

Jolie Bookspan
Jolie is a brilliant and revolutionary researcher of human physiology and is an expert in back and neck pain. She teaches an amazing Warrior Yoga class in Philadelphia, which is where I met her. Since then my back problems have gone away. For anyone else who has suffered with such problems, I would highly recommend her books and classes. Jolie is also a blackbelt in martial arts, a kickboxing champion, and a highly courageous woman who has used her own methods to recover from several nearly debilitating injuries.

Ya-Ting Chang
Ya-Ting was a fellow student of the Ann Schein studio at Peabody. She now plays with her husband Peter Sirotin in the very successful Mendelssohn Piano Trio, for information on which please refer to this link.

Noam Elkies
Noam is a math professor at Harvard, and also an extraordinarily talented musician and chessplayer. Since our greatest interests intersected so broadly, I was fortunate to get to know Noam well as an undergraduate. Check out his witty and diabolical chess problems and his equally clever and effective musical compositions!

Tom Kang
Tom was one of my roommates from Harvard. He is a true computer whiz (I wouldn't use the term lightly); he always used to help me out of my technical problems. He knows the industry very well, and has worked for Microsoft. He is also a violinist, and generally a great music enthusiast, owning a large collection of recordings and keeping up with current performers. Nowadays he is in graduate school at Carnegie Mellon.

Jeremy Martin
I met Jeremy first at an interview at Princeton University, but we both wound up at Harvard and were roommates our last three years. Above all we shared a great enthusiasm for the game of chess; certainly his keen competition helped more than anything to improve my own game so much while at Harvard. Jeremy is also very clever in math; being more enthusiastic and able than I am, he earned a Ph.D. in combinatorics at UCSD. He was also the first of the Harvard roommates to be married, in September of 1999, to Jennifer Wagner. They live now in Minnesota.

Matthew Monticchio
Matt is a fine composer, pianist, and theorist of music, currently located in Lancaster, PA and teaching at Peabody. I played his "Sonata One" for piano in Philadelphia and at Orleans, France. Please see his website for more details on his musical activities.

Tilman Skowroneck
Tilman was a very close friend from my Cornell days. A wonderful harpsichordist, fortepianist, Beethoven scholar and instrument mechanic (his father is renowned harpsichord builder Martin Skowroneck), Tilman is one of the most thoughtful people you will meet on many musical topics, especially performance practice relating to early keyboards. I was fortunate to have many in-depth conversations with him, and you will find much great information on the blog at his website.

David Thomas
Dave was a composer friend from a 20th century analysis class at Peabody. I re-encountered him in Philadelphia, and have played a number of his solo piano pieces, such as his Etudes and Second Piano Sonata. He's an excellent composer, jazz pianist, and a fun guy to chat with about music; you can find his recordings and dossier on his website.

Ron Thomas
Ron is a pianist, jazz pianist, composer, and knowledgable all-around musician in the Philadelphia area. He is the composition teacher of Dave Thomas (see Dave's entry) and Matt Monticchio - a fine group of interesting composers and musicians. You can find many provocative musings about music at Ron's site.

Victoria Ying
Victoria is a pharmacology student at Cornell and was for a long time the president of the chess club there. The club at Cornell was bustling with activity every weekday at high visibility in Willard Straight Hall. Victoria's page is full of pictures, showing her and her brother and also some of the beautiful sights of Cornell. I played on a team representing Cornell with Victoria and her brother Victor at the Global Youth Tertiary Institutes Chess Challenge 2001, an international intercollegiate tournament in Singapore. (See the picture on my chess homepage.)

Click here to return to my personal page

to send e-mail to Matthew Bengtson.

Copyright 2002-2008 Matthew Bengtson
Site design by Danny Schweers