Lisa Pegher

Lisa Pegher is an American percussion soloist and drummer. In her international career, she has performed throughout the world as a soloist, recitalist, and chamber musician. She is known for pioneering percussion as a solo instrument within the orchestral realm and beyond, making it her life’s work to present percussion to larger audiences by commissioning, collaborating, and creating new works and performances that bring percussion to the front of the stage. Lisa has been hailed by The New York Times as "tremendous," by The Boston Globe as “forcefully balletic,” and by New York City’s The Glass as “more than just a drummer—an alchemist of time, sound, and space, crafting visceral landscapes that penetrate the ears and mind.”

Featured in Symphony Magazine as one of the top six performers of her generation, Lisa has performed as a soloist with numerous orchestras, wind ensembles, and chamber groups across the globe, including the Orchestre Symphonique de Trois-Rivières in Canada, Orchestre de Mulhouse in France, the Thailand Philharmonic, Boston Modern Orchestra Project, Symphoria, Reading Symphony, American Symphony Orchestra, NOVUS Chamber Orchestra, Peninsula Festival Orchestra, Annapolis Symphony, Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble, Mission Chamber Orchestra, Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, Puerto Rico Symphony Orchestra, New Jersey Symphony Orchestra, South Carolina Philharmonic, NEPA Philharmonic, Lansing Symphony Orchestra, Asheville Symphony Orchestra, Lake George Music Festival Orchestra, Louisiana Philharmonic, and many more. Lisa performs concerti and new works by many of today’s leading composers such as Jennifer Higdon, Joseph Schwantner, Mathew Rosenblum, Tobias Broström, James MacMillan, Kevin Puts, and Derek Bermel, to name a few.

To date, she has given the world premiere performances of several percussion concertos and solo works composed especially for her by hundreds of well-known and up-and-coming composers around the world. Notably, in the mid-2000s, composer Mathew Rosenblum wrote both a full-length solo percussion work called "Northern Flicker" and a full-length double concerto that she recorded and premiered with the Boston Modern Orchestra and the Thailand Philharmonic. She has been a performer at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall, Perelman Performing Arts Center, the DiMenna Center for Classical Music in Manhattan, Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall, NYC's SubCulture, as well as numerous concert halls around the world as soloist.

Recently, she premiered a new concerto/show, "Circuits and Skins," written for her by Paul Dooley, which explores ways to meld orchestra with Electronic Dance Music (EDM). The work is said to “reach new heights in percussion music” and was called “a wild throwdown pitting full-tilt rock-and-roll drums against muscle-flexing symphonic fury” by the press. It has begun bringing EDM audiences into symphonic music halls. Another recent commission was Richard Danielpour's new percussion concerto "The Wounded Healer," which she premiered with the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra, where she was hailed as "an ideal interpreter of the work; receiving a vigorous ovation" by The New Jersey Star-Ledger. The work has since been toured extensively throughout the United States, Europe, and Canada. Later in 2023, Danielpour wrote a new work for string orchestra and solo vibraphone named "Tears of an Angel," which was written in memory of the tragedies that occurred around the world during the global pandemic. She premiered it at Schoenberg Hall in Los Angeles, California. In 2024, Lisa took part in the inaugural season of Manhattan’s newest concert hall, the Perelman Performing Arts Center, with the NOVUS orchestra as part of the production of Luna Pearl Woolf’s “Number Our Days.” Also in 2024, she gave the official NYC world premiere performance of her collaborative show “A.I.R.E” with the composers of the ICEBERG Music Collective at the DiMenna Center for Classical Music.

In recent years, Lisa has leaned into her own original works for amplified acoustic instruments, electronics, and live animation, as well as coding and software engineering. These worlds came together in her latest collaborative curated show "A.I.RE (Artificial Intelligence Rhythm Evolution)," where she commissioned 10 new works (2 written by her) in a combined multimedia effort that takes the listener through the evolution of percussion music from its roots to the eventual integration of computers and electronics. Another multimedia project, "ImPerFecTion," was created after she founded her own group, the SideFire Trio, in Brooklyn in 2017. This show and album present a mixture of free-form jazz and rock, live visual animation, and dance. Previously, she created the electronic/multimedia show called "Minimal Art: Imaginary Windows," which was released in 2010. A drummer at heart, Lisa has been the drummer/percussionist for many indie-rock, avant-jazz, and cross-genre bands throughout her career and has recorded on labels including the BMOP Sound Label (David Stock:  Concertos, Mathew Rosenblum: Möbius Loop)

Albany Records, AKM Productions (Minimal Art: Imaginary Windows), and her own label, Lisa P. Music Productions (The SideFire Trio: ImPerFection).

When not performing, Lisa enjoys running long distances, biking, yoga, and learning computer programming languages. She also currently leads the software engineering team, Inspire at the Music Creation Platform Company Splice headquartered in NYC and LA. Lisa endorses and is supported by Evans Drumheads, Marimba One, Black Swamp Percussion, and Reverie Drums.