Projects & Performances
Solo Piano Performances, Workshops & Speaking Engagements
Solo Piano
Adrienne Torf performs her original compositions for piano with a unique ability to communicate with her audiences through music. As one critic noted, “Torf succeeds in communicating her love of music, and in pulling us into it with her.” [Tatiana Schreiber, GCN] Long a favorite of women’s music audiences, in recent years she has branched out into composing for opera and theater ensembles, broadening both her reach and her stylistic range on the piano.
She has performed as a soloist in club venues across the United States, and as an accompanist in countless concert venues, including Carnegie Hall and Town Hall in NYC.
“Torf’s delicately skilled touch blended perfectly, no matter what the style…[In] the evening show-stopper, “Hay Una Mujer”… Torf performed an amazing, complex arrangement of the tune [which] brilliantly and eloquently conveyed the horror and loss.”
S.L. Guthrie, Anchorage Daily News
“Adrienne Torf is a true musician. Her compositions go beyond the frame of jazz and the classics to create a free and unique world. Yet, she maintains a dignity essential in music… [Her music] is colorful, mysterious and profound.”
ADLIB Magazine
“Brooklyn From The Roof is a gem of an album… [It] shows her to be a commanding talent, by turns romantic, introspective and witty.”
Jeff McLaughlin, The Boston Globe
“Adrienne is an incredible pianist.”
Holly Near
Workshop & Speaking Engagements
Adrienne is an affable and compelling speaker, as comfortable at the lectern and leading a workshop as she is at the piano. She speaks knowledgeably about topics ranging from musical accompaniment and the art of collaboration to adoption searches and the business of being a self-employed artist. Her experience as a touring and studio musician combined with her MBA and career as a nonprofit CFO gives her a unique “both halves of the brain” perspective, rooted in her commitment to political engagement and building community through music and poetry.
Four Pianists
In the Spring of 2025, renowned pianists Mary Watkins, Barbara Higbie, Tammy Lynn Hall and Adrienne Torf joined musical forces for an evening of their original pieces as well as well-known tunes – from four pianos. In their two performances at the Occidental Arts Center and The Freight in Berkeley, their mutual affection and respect based on decades of friendship shined through and the reception was resoundingly joyful.
VIDEOS BY IRENE YOUNG
Upcoming projects
Legends, Myths & DNA
Collaborators Raymond O. Caldwell and Adrienne Torf re-unite to tell the story of a decades-long adoptee’s search for birth family in a classic American musical form. Following on the multi-run success of their Poetry for the People: The June Jordan Experience, Torf and Caldwell draw on singular and universal experiences of adoptees, birth mothers, adoptive families and “search angels” as they navigate the legal, societal and emotional obstacles that they hope will ultimately lead to finding each other.
Work in Progress
Community Collaborations
The Awesome Difficult Work of Love
The Awesome Difficult Work of Love (ADWL) is a community-created spoken word and music performance that explores identity, connection, belonging, and what it means to build a more just and compassionate world together.
Through workshops, collaboration, and performance, ADWL brings together people from diverse backgrounds to share their stories, create original work, and listen across differences. Participants and audiences are invited to engage with experiences shaped by race, sexuality, age, gender identity and expression, physical ability, socioeconomic background, and more.
By creating space for honest storytelling and artistic expression, ADWL challenges narratives that divide us and centers voices that are often overlooked. The project nurtures empathy, deepens our understanding of one another, and builds connections rooted in trust, dignity, and shared humanity.
At its heart, ADWL is an invitation to practice love as an active force for healing—one story, one song, and one community at a time.
The piece includes a sentence from the late poet, teacher and activist June Jordan:
“We need, each of us, to begin the awesome difficult work of love, loving ourselves so that we become able to love others without fear, so that we can become powerful enough to enlarge the circle of our trust and our common striving for a safe, sunny afternoon near to flowering trees and under a very blue sky.”
- Premiere: 2008, Madison, WI with middle- and high school students performing. Produced by GSAFE.
- 2012: San Francisco, with LGBTQ+ performers of all ages. A Benefit for LYRIC.
- 2022: Sedona, AZ, with adult trauma survivors. Presented by Sedona International City of Peace/Sedona Arts for Peace Week.
- 2026: Flint, MI, with multi-cultural, multi-generational participants from greater Flint and Detroit. Funded in part by the Community Foundation of Greater Flint, performed at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Flint.
Semaj Brown
Flint Poet LaureateAdrienne with Voices of the Revolution
Adrienne Torf and Voices of the Revolution, an eclectic ensemble of feminist poets, perform collaborative works by Adrienne and her long-time collaborator, the late poet, teacher & activist June Jordan, as well as original piano compositions and poetry.
- Premiere: November, 2023, Women in the Arts Festival, Lansing, MI and Steinem Collection, Toledo Public Library
- April, 2024, Unitarian Universalist Church, Flint, MI and Urban Beat, Lansing, MI
- July, 2025, National Women’s Music Festival, Madison, WI
“This morning [after the performance by Adrienne Torf and Voices of the Revolution] ] I can yet hear the applause in my body. I can see the poetry of June Jordan in me and in every woman. It was EARTH SHIFT! …All those words in one place, on one stage with the piano of Adrienne Torf laying the substrate from which the Voices of the Revolution bolted up like lightning, growing from a fire field.” Semaj Brown, Poet Laureate of Flint, MI
Semaj Brown
Poet Laureate of Flint, MI
Videos – Words by June Jordan, Music by Adrienne Torf