Ian Pace
- Not to be confused with the drummer Ian Paice
Ian Pace (born 1968 in Hartlepool) is a British pianist.
Pace studied at Chetham's School of Music, The Queen's College, Oxford and the Juilliard School in New York. His main teacher was the Hungarian pianist György Sándor.
He is particularly well-known for playing music of the 20th and 21st centuries, especially contemporary British, French, German and Italian music. Premieres he has given include works by Richard Barrett, Luc Brewaeys, Aaron Cassidy, James Clarke, Raymond Deane, James Dillon, Gordon Downie, Pascal Dusapin, Richard Emsley, James Erber, Brian Ferneyhough, Michael Finnissy, Christopher Fox, Volker Heyn, Wieland Hoban, Evan Johnson, Hilda Paredes, Horatiu Radulescu, Frederic Rzewski, Howard Skempton, Gerhard Stäbler, Serge Verstockt, Jay Alan Yim and Walter Zimmermann. His huge repertoire also includes more established works by Boulez, Stockhausen, Barraqué, Xenakis, Ligeti, Nono, Kagel and Cage, among others, as well as most of the standard repertoire from Beethoven through to Bartók. In 1996 he gave a large-scale six-concert series of the complete piano works of Michael Finnissy, and in 2001 he premiered the same composer's five-and-a-half-hour The History of Photography in Sound. He regularly performs together with the Arditti Quartet, and is also artistic director of the ensemble Topologies.
He has played in 20 countries, including at most major European festivals, and has recorded numerous CDs for the Black Box, Métier, Mode, Naïve, NMC and Stradivarius labels, including discs of Dusapin, Finnissy, Fox, Zimmermann and the new complexity disc Tracts. From 2003-2006 he was AHRC Creative and Performing Arts Research Fellow at the University of Southampton. He is currently Lecturer in Musicology at Dartington College of Arts. He has written widely on music, co-editing and contributing large chapters to Uncommon Ground: The Music of Michael Finnissy (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), as well as publishing articles on Barrett, Cage, Dusapin, Fox, Kagel, Helmut Lachenmann, Liszt, Salvatore Sciarrino, Skempton and Xenakis. As a musicologist, his areas of speciality are nineteenth-century performance practice, music and society, the work of Theodor Adorno, and post-1945 modernism.
Pace is also known for his leftist views on music and musicology and his advocacy of modernist aesthetics.