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Had a great time teaching Mary’s micro-camp in Anchorage and the Bluegrass 4-H Camp in Cordova the past few months. Just finished up the Super Saturated Sugar Strings summer tour as well, it was great to get into the groove of playing with the band again. Excited to get back into regular lessons this fall!
Cordova 4H Bluegrass Camp
Palmer Musk Ox Farm show
We had a lovely spring recital and music jam to wrap up the semester. We’ll probably do this format again next spring where students share solo pieces and also play as many songs as they know in the group jam! Have a great summer and I’ll see you in September 2024!
Always good to play the folk fest in the depths of winter! Such an important time to feel connected through community and music. All 9 performers had played in previous years too!
This year we collaborated with Kat’s and Sara’s students to create a winter-themed song that students had input on. Kat arranged it using students’ lyrical themes on winter, chord structure and fiddle riffs. Then we all played it together!
We had a great time in Hope for the kids show portion of SugarFest! A small but enthusiastic turnout jammed tunes with some of the band members before the evening show. The dad joke competition was packed with mediocre humor and it was so fun to play music again for the first time as a new mom! Hope to do it again next year.
Twas a chilly May day but even numb fingers didn’t slow the jam!
The return of the Anchorage Folk Festival at the Wendy Williamson was a blast with a lot of new faces this year. So good to have this festival back and going strong! It’s one of my favorites for student performances. In February, Kat and I put on our annual joint recital for students to share songs at the Wilda Marston. It is always a highlight of the year to see our students perform there together! Currently I am taking a break from teaching until May as we are expecting a baby any day now. I’ll be doing a summer session of teaching for just the months of May and June and hosting a few backyard jams. I will not be teaching in July or August but will resume my full time teaching schedule in September 2023!
February Recital 2023
The Nave is a wonderful community space in Spenard and turned out to be a great place to host our fiddle/ guitar jam session this past September! Very spacious indeed, we had a beginner jam that slowly morphed into an advanced jam. Excited to do more of these next summer on our studio lawn!
This photo was from way back in May but I’m just now getting around to posting it. Another great recital with Kat Moore at the Wendy Williamson!
It felt good to be back in the Wilda Marston Theatre sharing music! Proud of them all for braving the stage to share a song, whether for the first time or what felt like the first time again.
I’m quite proud of this showcase we were able to create here in Anchorage with the help of a great sound engineer, Lucy Peckham, and videographer, Alex Troutman! It was for the annual ArtsNW booking conference held a few weeks ago in Spokane, WA.
The last of the Spenard Yard sessions! It was fun stretching out in the new yard and playing together this summer! The Super Saturated Sugar Strings had a great time playing at the Palmer Alehouse the following night. Not sure what the winter recital will look like this year, in the meantime, stay safe everyone!
First porch jam of the year! It was small but so nice to hear students playing together in real time. Looking forward to the next one, Friday July 16th! Thanks for breaking in the '“porch” guys and gals!
Incredible to watch these amazing young violinists virtually this year!
A song-gram is a song you write for someone as a gift. We’ll be working on these this month using prompts provided by students. The goal is to generate art by turning a written prompt into a musical idea. The twist is that the art is about and for someone else, you are sharing your musical ideas as a creative gift. The songs could turn out all sorts of ways but it’s a way to connect us in a language we could all get better at speaking, music. Sharing that is what it’s all about.
We premiered this live on YouTube a few weeks ago for our virtual recital. So proud of these 15 students, ages 5-19, who navigated and submitted multiple recordings of themselves to metronomes and backing tracks without knowing what the final product would sound like! This was a new collaboration aspect to our second virtual recital this year. Happy Holidays and Happy New Year!
A compilation of music submissions from students of all skill levels over the past few weeks, written to a short fall poem prompt by Henry & Harper.
Been trying out some social distance jamming lately and lucking out with the August weather. It’s been fun scouting out quiet open spaces in the Anchorage area and hoping they remain quiet and the weather holds on the day of! A voice amplifier would be nice but this spot at Kincaid was quiet enough that I didn’t need one to make it work.
Happy to share some new Super Saturated Sugar Strings tunes with you! Playing music with friends is quite emotional after going through musical withdrawals! I forgot how good it feels. Thankful for the Anchorage community for providing a way for us to share and listen to music right now. You can catch other local virtual concerts happening this summer on the Anchorage Downtown Partnership’s facebook page too.
I hosted and performed in my first online student recital last month; we uploaded our performances to an unlisted YouTube playlist to view and share at our discretion for the next month or so. It was very cool to see how each video was made and how it contributed to the performance itself, some were outside with breathtaking views and others had cool visual effects. The hardest part about this for me was not being able to do group songs with students but I had to remind myself that coming together in this new way was a first and that in itself was growth to be proud of. Finding ways to grow right now is hard, I am finding it helpful to define goals and work towards them, even though they’re not what they used to be. My goal as a teacher and performer is to keep improving our playing, performing and expression of music, however that may be. As a musician and music lover, my lifestyle has been stifled by the absence of performing and attending shows where I used to connect with others through sharing the joys of music. Now we must find other ways to nurture the joys of music that are not so group dependent. We must be patient, be flexible with our goals and celebrate even the smallest ones, and most importantly stay connected to keep each other strong.