The Boston Text & Tone Festival is a festival of song, celebrating language as a doorway to experiencing the richness and diversity of human and musical expression.

It all started when…

Our friendship began while we were studying solo piano repertoire as conservatory students in Boston. As we started working more and more with singers in text-based music making, we experienced a new kind of expressive mixture, a collision of seemingly opposite worlds. The “abstract” world of music itself (open-ended, suggestive, spiritual) met the “literal” world of words (direct, structured, narrative)...Or is it the other way around?! Perhaps music is more literal and poetry more abstract! Whatever the case, there are infinite possibilities whenever these universes collide. Thanks to countless poets and composers over the past several hundred years, they have collided over and over again.​

The mixing of language and music gives us not only a rich, varied, and ever-growing repertoire to explore; it also creates community. The inherent spirit of sharing in singer-pianist duo work immediately lends itself to human connection. And this type of connection doesn’t stay locked up in a practice room! We are lucky to be part of the community of singers, pianists, poets, composers, mentors, and audience members that naturally forms around the world of song.