Tanya Ekanayaka

Tanya Ekanayaka is a Sri Lankan virtuoso pianist and prolific composer of contemporary solo piano music. She is also an educator, a devoted humanitarian, and a multidisciplinary scholar in the fields of linguistics, English literature, and musicology. She was born in 1977, in the Sri Lankan kingdom of Kandy. When she was five years old, she began learning the piano from her mother, Indira Ekanayaka, and later she studied with Bridget Halpé. Ekanayaka performed her first public recital in 1989, and she made her debut as a soloist with the Symphony Orchestra of Sri Lanka in 1993, in the SOSL concerto competition. She won first place and was the youngest competitor to have ever participated. While beginning her international career as a pianist, she also studied linguistics and English literature at the University of Peradeniya in Sri Lanka. After she completed her BA degree, she attended the University of Edinburgh, where she completed her MS in linguistics and English literature, and she received a doctorate for her interdisciplinary research in the fields of linguistics and musicology. In 1999 she earned her Professional Performer’s Diploma from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. She became a lecturer at the University of Peradeniya in 2003, and she joined the staff of the University of Edinburgh in 2007. Her 2010 performance in the “Pianists of the World” recital series at St. Martin-in-the-Fields was the first time that a Sri Lankan had ever performed there. The original composition that she performed, Adahas: of Wings of Roots, was one of the first entries in her rapidly growing worklist. Since then, she has composed a large body of piano music which she primarily performs. Ekanayaka is ambidextrous and she experiences synesthesia, which both have an influence on her style as a composer. Another unique characteristic of her music is that she publishes her compositions in the recorded format instead of creating traditional, visual scores. From 2012 to 2014 she led a humanitarian project which aided Sri Lankan children who were impoverished by the Sri Lankan Civil War. She released her first album of original piano music in 2015, Reinventions - Rhapsodies for Piano. Her album Twelve Piano Prisms was released in 2018, and in 2021 she released The Planets & Humanity - Piano Reflections. Her 2023 release 18 Piano Sutras & 25 South Asian Pianisms features 43 of her original works inspired by 40 critically endangered languages from six continents.
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