About Max

Max has also performed around the globe, with appearances across the US, Mexico, England, Scotland, France, Austria, Italy and Spain, performing solo as well as alongside groups such as eighth blackbird, the Akropolis Reed Quintet, Mirror Visions Ensemble, with whom he recorded the video album “Midnight Magic.” 

As the winner of Juilliard’s concerto competition, Max made his Lincoln Center debut in Alice Tully Hall performing Schoenberg’s Piano Concerto, Op. 42 with the Juilliard Orchestra under David Robertson. As a concerto soloist, Max has performed a diverse range of works, from Prokofiev’s Third Concerto to Bernstein’s Age of Anxiety with ensembles like the Yale Symphony Orchestra, the Bellflower Symphony, and the Pasadena Orchestra. 

As a passionate interpreter of the work of Schoenberg, Max also had the honor of performing Pierrot Lunaire at the Schoenberg Center in Vienna in honor of the composer's 150th birthday on a residency in the composer’s Mödling home. 

This year, Max made his Carnegie Hall debut in a concert exploring the work of Meredith Monk alongside the composer herself. Other notable recent engagements include performances with Fred Sherry at the Guggenheim’s Peter B. Lewis Theatre, the North America premiere of G. F. Haas’ monumental “11,000 Strings” for fifty microtonally tuned pianos and chamber orchestra alongside Klangforum Wein at the Park Avenue Armory, concerts in the basin of the world’s largest refracting telescope housed at Yerkes Observatory in Williams’ Bay, Wisconsin, and recent collaborations with Steinway Spirio, Hennessy Cognac, and Lugano Diamonds. 

As an educator, Max recently had the honor of teaching a “composing for piano” workshop to students of the New York Youth Symphony. Additionally, he has taught masterclasses and lessons to students at the University of Chicago, the University of Puget Sound, the Schwob School of Music, and Coastal Carolina University. 

Max is a core member of the award winning two piano/two percussion ensemble icarus Quartet (iQ), composed of percussionists Jeff Stern and Matt Keown and pianist Larry Weng alongside Max.  His work with icarus has been described as “about as perfect as one can ask for” (The Cultural Voice of North Carolina). With iQ, Max has performed across the country, with recent engagements as a part of the Secrest Artist Series at Wake Forest University, the Jacobson Artist Series in Puget Sound, eighth blackbird’s inaugural Eyrie Festival in Chicago, Colorado State University’s Classical Convergence Series, The University of Chicago, Peabody Conservatory, Lebanon Valley College, Pennsylvania State University, and Columbus State’s Schwob School of Music, with upcoming engagements at CCM’s Musica Nova series, Yale School of Music’s New Music New Haven series, Constellation Chamber Music, Yale University’s Schwartzman Center Series, Constellations Chamber Music in DC, at the Pearl Street Arts Center in Indiana,  as well as part of the Aspen Music Festival’s Summer ‘27 season. 

Last season, with iQ, Max had the honor of premiering the inaugural iteration of “Voices from the Inside” alongside PeabodyNEXT ensemble which paired Dallapiccola’s “Canti di Prigione” (songs of imprisonment) with a world premiere work for piano/percussion quartet and choir by Elijah Daniel Smith, who set the poetry of an incarcerated inmate in the Texas penal system. The premiere concerts took place in the George Peabody Library as well as in Washington DC’s Bloomberg Center, and featured a panel of formerly incarcerated artists. 

Additionally, the 24-25 season held a world premiere of icarus’s program Bartók Reborn, which grew out of a need to commission a body of repertoire for the same set of percussion instruments as Bela Bartók’s seminal Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion. The program found its compositional home in the voices of Martin Bresnick, Viet Cuong, and Jennifer Higdon, whom iQ commissioned for a suite reflecting the scope and legacy of Bartók nearly a century later. 

This season with icarus Quartet, Max will be premiering two new programs. The first, entitled Wilderness Suite, is an evening length composition by Ruby Fulton in collaboration with two geographers and eight video artists. The project was inspired by rephotography efforts after all human development across 2,361,767 acres of land in central Idaho ceased, creating the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness, the largest federally protected wilderness area in the contiguous United States. Forty-five years later, the Wilderness tells a unique story of “anti-development.” icarus has asked eight video artists to put images taken before and after this legislation was passed into motion to accompany an evening length composition by Fulton, performed live by the quartet. The Suite is set to premiere in late February at The Voxel theatre in Baltimore, presented by new music organization Mind on Fire. 

The second new program, entitled Eclectic Electric, explores electro-acoustic music written for the quartet, largely by young composers commissioned through iQ’s call for scores program entitled “iQ Tests.” This program now enters its sixth iteration and in 2026-27 will offer two new student composers a commission for the quartet alongside workshops and coachings with composer and friend Nico Muhly. 

Later this year, Max’s work with icarus Quartet will be heard on the studio album Heart Brut: the Music of Amy Beth Kirsten, which pairs works written by Kirsten for iQ, Soprano Molly Netter, and Sandbox Percussion. 

Max graduated Phi Beta Kappa and Magna cum Laude from Yale College with a BA in mathematics, where he studied at the Yale School of Music with Wei-Yi Yang. At Yale, he was the managing director of Yale’s undergraduate opera company, Opera Theatre of Yale College, and the artistic director of Yale College’s premiere chamber orchestra, YUCO. During his tenure at Yale, he was the recipient of the Sharp Prize for most outstanding performer in the Class of 2024, the Seldon Memorial Award for “verve and idealism” in music and the humanities, and the V. Browne Irish Award for community impact and excellence in the performing arts. 

Max is currently pursuing a Master’s Degree at the Juilliard School under Julian Martin and Soyeon Kate Lee. He lives in New York City, where he loves the cold (an interest inherited from its lack in his Los Angeles upbringing, no doubt).

California born pianist Max Hammond’s passion lies in putting canonical works in conversation with new voices. As an artist who plays with the “the finesse, the grace, and the ebullience of a Mozart” (Harry Rolnick, The Concerto Net), Max aspires to use his music to spark a dialogue through which we may consider questions of belonging, historicity, queerness, and temporality.

An avid performer of contemporary music, Max has had the honor to premiere works by composers Jennifer Higdon, Martin Bresnick, Georg Frederich Haas, Joan Tower, Carlos Simon, Meredith Monk, and Harold Meltzer. He is the recipient of the Robert Turnbull Piano Foundation Grant, which he is using to support the commission of a solo work by Viet Cuong, premiering in 2027.