Sean Bennett

Hailed as a world-class pianist by prominent New York critics John Bell Young and Ruth Laredo, Bennett began his musical career at age 5 after winning a prize in a Disney song-arranging contest. At 14, after becoming the youngest in the world to perform Rachmaninov's 3rd Piano Concerto, a generous sponsor awarded him with a Steinway concert grand piano and funding to study with Juilliard and Curtis Professors. His formative teachers included Dmitry Paperno, Jerome Lowenthal, Seymour Lipkin, Leon Fleisher, Peter Serkin, Emanuel Ax, John Browning, Mary Veverka, and Carolyn McCracken. After giving 400 concerts and performances with dozens of orchestras, on NPR, regular radio, television, and being named a winner in 50 national and international competitions including the Kosciuszko National Chopin Competition and 7 Awards from Steinway, Bennett retired from competitions.

After performing for the foreign consulates of 20 countries and for Polish President Lech Walesa, Bennett took a hiatus from performances, moving from DePaul University in Chicago, IL to Cambridge, MA where, as a USA TODAY All-USA College Academic Team Member on full scholarship at Harvard University he received a high honors B.A. in Neuroscience working with MIT linguist Noam Chomsky and psychologist Richard Hackman in 2001. While at Harvard, he released early recordings on http://www.mp3.com/sean and on Vitaminic.com. These recordings were collectively downloaded by 45,000 music enthusiasts, earning Bennett a rank in the top 10 classical artists among 240,000 on MP3.com and his page was subsequently translated into 17 languages on Vitaminic.com.

Since graduating, Bennett has emerged from his performance hiatus and recently became the first to write down, record and perform several of the famous Horowitz transcriptions. He currently pursues a Ph.D in Cognitive Musicology at Cambridge University in England as a Gates Cambridge Scholar becoming the first scientist to study why songs get stuck in our heads. In recent years, he has won teaching awards teaching Psychology at Harvard with Steven Pinker, freelanced as an organizational behavior and strategy consultant for such recipients as Bill Gates Sr. and the Gates Cambridge Trust, and worked on an NSF funded project called Group Brain investigating cognitive complementarity in team design. Musically, he is currently preparing his next generation of arrangements for release in late 2006 and enjoys maintaining a small studio of advanced piano students.