Pianist Cory Smythe is an inventive improviser, chamber musician, and performer of contemporary classical music. As a member of the International Contemporary Ensemble, he has contributed to numerous premieres, worked with composers Philippe Hurel, Dai Fujikura, Steve Lehman, Magnus Lindberg, Kaija Saariaho, Mathias Pintscher, and Alvin Lucier among many others, and performed in venues across the U.S. and abroad. His recent performance of solo piano music by Lindberg was praised by the Boston Globe for its ‘grace and intensity’, and a forthcoming recording by ICE (Mode Records) will feature Cory as the piano soloist in Iannis Xenakis’s ‘Palimpsest’. Cory has played with or among a wide array of artists, including the Greg Osby Four, the Metropolitan Opera orchestra, violinist Hilary Hahn, Present Music, Tyshawn Sorey, and Anthony Braxton. In the spring of 2011 he released his debut album, Pluripotent — a collection of original compositions and improvisations for solo piano which has garnered praise from New York Times critic Steve Smith among others. Cory is a graduate of the music schools at Indiana University and the University of Southern California, where his principal teachers were Luba Edlina-Dubinsky and Stewart Gordon.