August to December 2021
The last six months have been wonderfully busy; concerts are starting to come back, almost all my students are back in person, and I’ve continued work on some projects near and dear to my heart.
I was ecstatic to be able to play an orchestrated version of Seven Songs for Soprano by David Monrad Johanson with soloist Laura Loge. Laura is a beautiful singer who champions lesser-performed Nordic works and is fluent in Swedish, so it was lovely to work with her and hear her take on this work. David Monrad Johanson is perhaps most famous for writing the earlierst biography of Edvard Grieg, but he was also a composer in his own right. His writing is very Nordic in style but he was also extremely influenced by Debussy and composed in “a swarm of colors and visions.” More information about this intriguing composer is available in Steven Luksan’s program notes for this concert. I loved the orchestra colors in Adam Stern’s arrangement of Seven Songs, which along with Agathe Backer Grøndahl’s Scherzo for Orchestra were the first two pieces I performed with my new headjoint.
Yes, I finally bought a new headjoint! It’s a 14k gold Burkart headjoint that I tried out for kicks one day and couldn’t let it go. I’ve never been a fan of me on gold, but this headjoint feels so supple and flexible and makes practicing feel so new and hopeful again.
I’ve also gone back to school! In the next two weeks I’ll finish my first quarter as a DMA Woodwind performance student as well as watch my Pierce students complete their first in person juries since I was hired a year and a half ago. Being back in the academic world has been wonderful and I’m loving the access to libraries and learning materials that I’ve been taking full advantage of in order to make progress on some of my lingering research projects. More on those next time!
Other highlights of the last six months include playing a beautiful Telemann flute and recorder concerto with the lovely Vicki Boeckman and a group of adult students at Music Center of the Northwest, digging up yet more works by women composers, and continuing to work with the Antigua-Barbuda Youth Symphony students leading towards their December concerts. In the next few months I’m looking forward to preparing a DMA recital, coordinating the back-to-in-person SFS Horsfall Competition, and continuing to put together my research about women composers.
I even wrote two pieces for flutes and voice this summer using text from local poet Lynne Ellis’s first book. More about her, including her impactful poetry at this link, and we’ll see, maybe those works will even see the light of day later this year!
For more information on my most recent exploits, click any photo to be taken to my Instagram feed.
