People

Grammy-winning musician Adam Sliwinski is one of today’s foremost percussion artists, as well as a pianist, writer, and teacher. A member of the ensemble Sō Percussion (proclaimed as “brilliant” and “consistently impressive” by the New York Times) since 2002, Adam has performed at venues as diverse as Carnegie Hall, The Bonnaroo Festival, Disney Concert Hall with the LA Philharmonic, NPR’s Tiny Desk, and much in between. Sō Percussion has also toured extensively around the world, including multiple featured performances at the Barbican Centre in London, and tours to Western Europe, South America, Trinidad and Tobago, Australia, West Africa, and Russia.

In 2025, So Percussion celebrated their 25th anniversary with an eight-disc box set of new and unreleased recordings called “25 x 25.” They were also honored with the Grammy award for Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance for 2024’s Rectangles and Circumstance with Caroline Shaw. Adam appears on all of Sō Percussion’s 30+ recordings on Cantaloupe Music, Nonesuch Records, Brassland, 4AD, and other labels. In 2024, Sō Percussion was also featured on Caroline Shaw’s soundtrack for the Ken Burns documentary Leonardi da Vinci on PBS.

As a soloist, Adam has specialized in creating contemporary piano and keyboard repertoire, particularly on Dan Trueman’s bitKlavier, a “prepared digital piano.” In 2015, the first album of bitKlavier recordings called Nostalgic Synchronic was released on New Amsterdam Records. Featuring eight etudes written by Trueman for Sliwinski, the pieces demonstrated a whole new range of expressive possibilities for digital keyboard instruments. In 2024, Trueman released a double album on Many Arrows Music of a set of new preludes and commissioned pieces featuring Adam and pianist Cristina Altamura on bitKlavier.

As a percussion soloist, Adam has performed many times with the International Contemporary Ensemble, founded by classmates from Oberlin. He has conducted over a dozen world premieres with the International Contemporary Ensemble, including residencies at Harvard, Columbia, and NYU. In 2014, ECM Records released the live recording of the premiere of Vijay Iyer’s Radhe Radhe with Adam conducting.

Adam writes about music on his Substack newsletter called “Rhythm Begins.” His writing is featured as chapters in two books from the Cambridge University Press: The Cambridge Companion to Percussion and The Cambridge Companion to Rhythm.

Along with his wife Cristina Altamura, Adam runs Legacy Arts International, a non-profit based in Princeton, New Jersey which is dedicated to preserving musical legacies and presenting eclectic concert programs. Through Legacy Arts, Adam and Cristina are writing a book about her piano teacher Franco Scala from Italy’s Imola Academy. They also run the Altamura Legacy concert series together in Princeton.

Adam is co-director of the Sō Percussion Summer Institute, an annual intensive course on the campus of Princeton University for college-aged percussionists. He has taught percussion both in masterclass and privately at more than 100 conservatories and universities in the USA and internationally. Along with his colleagues in Sō Percussion, Adam is Senior Lecturer and Edward T. Cone performer-in-residence at Princeton University. He also co-founded the Bard Conservatory percussion program, which Eric Cha-Beach and Jason Treuting now run. He received his Doctor of Musical Arts and his Masters degrees at The Yale School of Music with marimba soloist Robert van Sice, and his Bachelors at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music with Michael Rosen.

Check out Adam’s blog about music.

Some of Adam’s other Work:

Solo Performance

In 2015 New Amsterdam Records released Adam’s recording of Dan Trueman’s Nostalgic Synchronic etudes for the bitKlavier, a “prepared digital piano.”

HERE is more information about the project

Here also are videos of two of the etudes.

David Lang’s String of Pearls for solo marimba

Conducting

Vijay Iyer’s Radhe Radhe, at Carolina Performing Arts. Featured on NPR.  This is the world premiere with the International Contemporary Ensemble.

Claude Debussy – Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun
Awesome quirky chamber version created for Arnold Scheonberg.
At MoMA with alumni of the Bang on a Can Summer Festival