Joan Benson returns to the concert stage after a decade centered on Buddhist meditation.

Years ago, Suzuki Roshi of Japan taught Benson to express moods without becoming them. Later, at Plum Village, France, she walked alone with Thich Nhat Hanh among forest daffodils. It was Tibet's Venerable Bogar Rinpoche and Thrangu Rinpoche, however, that led her to months of silence in the monasteries of Salt Spring Island and Nova Scotia. Now she seeks to enliven our troubled world with a reawakening to tender beauty --in life, in nature, in sound.

Joan Benson has always looked to living composers as a primary source of inspiration. Besides Percy Grainger, she studied with Messiaen in Paris and wrote computer music at the University of Utrecht. By the 1980's American and European composers were dedicating music to Benson. She particularly likes to play David Loeb's clavichord works that reflect the haiku of Japan. In the West Coast Women Conductor/ Symposium of 1984, Benson performed some of her own music. In the 1990's, she improvised with vibrachordist Karl Berger of Woodstock fame for the Findhorn Festival in Scotland.

Joan Benson started off the 21st century in a solo recital for the North West Festival, "Waging Peace in the New Millennium." Lou Harrison admired her performance of his early keyboard sonata, and her playing of a John Cage "Landscape" gave the modem piano a range of nuance rarely heard today.

In 2002, composer Chris Chafe wrote for her the first work for clavichord and electronic music. In May, the two premiered "Tangent" in the new Cross Current Series at San Jose's Museum of Art. The result was so exciting that Chafe and Benson are now collaborating in concerts together.

Joan Benson approaches today's short time spans with imagination. For example, she intersperses poetry and prose with the music she is playing. Interest in the word stems from her experience as a child actor for New Orleans' Little Theatre. Later she won prizes for acting and playwriting. More recently, her poetry was published in Nimrod International Magazine. In fact, Kansas City Baroque Festival called her playing "the purest kind of poetry."

Currently Benson likes to alternate sound bites of 14th and 15th century music with literature of that time. She intersperses Fanny Mendelssohn's Songs Without Words with poignant letters to her brother, Felix. She gathers folksongs of Scandinavia, Scotland and America for her programs.

Every moment for Joan Benson is a new beginning, a new challenge, into creating events that touch her public. Thus she welcomes programming suggestions, incorporating them in recitals with elegant warmth and ease.