Lowry Yankwich

I began playing piano when I was five years old, but it wasn’t until I was about 10 that it became something more than an obligation for me. My first idol was Glenn Gould, whose recordings of Bach I listened to ravenously, and tried to imitate. My teacher was Canadian, so, despite the fact that we were in California, I studied through the Royal Conservatory of Music program in Toronto. After high school, I spent a year working with Michel Fournier in Quebec, before sitting for my performance exams for the Associate Diploma of Performance at the Royal Conservatory.

Music has remained a part of my life. In college at Stanford University, I played solo and chamber music, and sang in a South Asian fusion a cappella group. After college, I took continuing courses at Juilliard in music theory.

My relationship to music took a turn when I decided to produce a podcast about the Goldberg Variations and the way it has worked deeply into the lives of musicians and music-lovers around the world. Over four years, I gathered interviews with a spectrum of interviewees, from Grammy-nominated artists to an architect who can’t design a building without listening to the piece. The result is “30 Bach,” a journey through the Goldberg Variations that crosses genres and media, from classical to jazz to dance. I’m now working on a second classical podcast called The Tonic, in collaboration with tonebase. This podcast is broader in scope, and generally oriented toward exploring music through the lens of history. Recent episodes have delved into innovations of Debussy and Ravel and the history of pedaling technique and technology.