Biography

Jonathan (Jon) Salamon is an award-winning historical keyboardist and scholar based in New York City and Cambridge, UK. Dedicated to music of the Baroque and Classical periods, he has performed and presented scholarship at conferences and festivals in the U.S. and abroad. Jonathan is a committed educator and advocate for the performing arts and humanities.

Jonathan is currently the Principal Keyboardist with the Chamber Orchestra of New York, with whom he made his sold-out Weill Hall debut in 2021 as soloist in Bach’s Harpsichord Concerto in D minor. He has performed at venues including Carnegie Hall, the Guggenheim Museum, the Conservatorium van Amsterdam, and The Jewish Museum, among others. In 2019, he was the Third Prizewinner at the 44th annual Mathieu Duguay Early Music Competition in Laméque, Canada. Jonathan has performed in masterclasses for artists such as Jordi Savall, Pierre Hantaï, Luca Guglielmi, Peter Sykes, and Ketil Haugsand.

As a 2020-21 Fulbright Scholar to the Netherlands, Jonathan researched and performed the eighteenth-century repertoire of Amsterdam’s Sephardic synagogue. He has presented lecture-recitals at the Morris Steinert Collection of Musical Instruments at Yale; the joint conference of the American Bach Society and the Mozart Society of America; Harvard’s Graduate Music Forum conference; and the Historical Keyboard Society of North America’s conference (2018), among others. For several years, he played continuo for the Yale Baroque Opera Project, assisted in tuning at Yale’s Collection of Musical Instruments, and was a frequent collaborator on chamber music concerts. Committed to supporting early music communities in North America, Jonathan was a member of Early Music America’s Emerging Professional Leadership Council from 2019-2021.

Jonathan was born in New York City and grew up in Connecticut. He earned his Bachelor of Music degree cum laude from NYU, majoring in Piano Performance and with a minor in Law and Society; his principal teachers included Seymour Bernstein (piano) and Dr. Morwaread Farbood (harpsichord). Jonathan holds Master of Music and Doctor of Musical Arts degrees in Harpsichord Performance from the Yale School of Music, where he studied with Arthur Haas. He counts among his mentors Menno van Delft, with whom he studied during his Fulbright at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam.

A passionate educator, Jonathan was an Adjunct Assistant Professor of the Humanities at SUNY Purchase College, where he taught courses in music history and writing. While at Yale, he taught secondary harpsichord lessons and was a Teaching Assistant for a graduate course on the history of early music. Jonathan enjoys giving lecture-recitals to the public, making classical music topics more accessible. He has also taught privately for over 15 years.

Jonathan is currently a PhD candidate in music history at the University of Cambridge on a Gates Cambridge Scholarship, where he is completing a dissertation on the style and structure of Händel’s keyboard music. In fall 2023, with his colleague Alexander Nicholls, he spearheaded the first-ever conference devoted to galant schema theory called “Galant Schemata in Theory & Practice,” featuring major scholars and performers over a virtual format. They have since convened two more conferences.

He has published in Min-Ad, the journal of the Israel Musicological Society, and written reviews for Harpsichord & Fortepiano Magazine (UK). Jonathan is currently co-editing a collection of essays for a music theory volume (under contract) with Boydell & Brewer. Other forthcoming publications include a book chapter on schema theory and partimento, and an article in BACH Journal.