About
Biography
About Adrienne
Adrienne Torf, composer and pianist, has three solo albums of original compositions for piano and synthesizer: Here I Am (2025), Two Hands Open (2003) and Brooklyn from the Roof (1986), all on her label A Bongo Music.
Adrienne and poet, teacher and activist June Jordan were artistic collaborators for nineteen years, until Jordan’s passing in 2002. Together they wrote their full-length documentary opera Bang Bang Über Alles and numerous works for performance by themselves and by ensembles, recorded on Collaboration: Selected Works, 1983–2000 (A Bongo Music, 2000).
Adrienne and playwright and director Raymond O. Caldwell co-devised Poetry for the People: The June Jordan Experience. The show ran at Theater Alliance in Washington, DC in 2022 and 2024, and premieres on the west coast at the Fountain Theatre in Los Angeles, January–March 2026. She and Caldwell are in the early stages of writing a musical about her successful 37-year search for birth family.
Adrienne recently composed the score For Women Serving Time (libretto by Fatemeh Keshavarz) under a commission from IN Series Opera, Washington DC, premiering in March–April 2026 in Washington DC and Baltimore. Her other theater works include The Awesome Difficult Work of Love, a community participation performance piece slated for Flint, MI in 2026 and previously produced in Madison, WI (2008), San Francisco (2012) and Sedona, AZ (2022).
Long a women’s music audience favorite for her piano work with Holly Near and Linda Tillery, Adrienne’s keyboard work appears on more than a dozen commercially released albums by Holly Near, Cris Williamson, Meg Christian, Ferron, Kay Gardner, and others.