Karen Power is an Irish composer who uses environmental sounds and acoustic instruments in her intriguing work. She is a master field recordist who has recorded sounds in some of the worlds most isolated and challenging locations including The Arctic, Amazon, Namib Desert, Outback Australia, and Antarctica. She has shared clips of her work including The Bats of Namibia, Frogs of Angor Wat, fascinating bog sounds and arctic ice sounds in collaborations with the Quiet Music Ensemble and many brilliant collaboraters on her project human nature.  She’s also shared with us a raw field recording from her recent trip to record a double cicada brood emergence. She certainly helped deepen my awareness to soundscapes that brought me back to my first encounter with this idea when I took a course on Soundscapes from R. Murray Shafer. Karen and I also talked about her projects working to explore listeneing, composing and improvising with young children and other related projects to provide inclusive music making with people living with disabiliities. 

 Like all my episodes, you can watch this on my YouTube channel or listen to the podcast on your favourite platform, and I’ve also linked the transcript.

Alisa Rose is a multi-style violinist and fiddler, composer and educator, and in this episode we’re shining a light on her wonderful new album with mandolinist Tristan Scroggins, Speranza. You’ll hear about how she found her way to such an interesting and diverse career from learning Old-Time music from retired farmers in Wisconsin as a child to classical training with the legendary Camilla Wicks at the San Francisco Conservatory, where she’s come full circle as a teacher. Alisa shared wonderful insights into teaching music, including body awareness and using creativity prompts in her improvisation classes. She shared powerful experiences from her tour in Eastern Europe as an Ambassador of the State Department, and advice about the benefits of organizing house concerts. Linked are the video, podcast and transcript. 

Juliana Soltis is an innovative cellist who has done extensive research to connect listeners with some forgotten stories of classical music. In this episode we talked about her recent album American Woman which features cello and piano music of women composers; you’ll hear Juliana’s insights into the lives of Mary Howe, Amy Beach, Margaret Bonds, Helen Crane, Dorothy Rudd Moore and Florence Price and hear excerpts from this album which Juliana recorded with the wonderful pianist Ruoting Li. Many listeners will be familiar with Juliana’s playing as a Baroque cellist, and it was fascinating to hear about how the French relinquished their beloved viol relunctuantly to the Italian cello. I really love Juliana’s recording of the complete Suites for solo cello of J.S. Bach and you’ll hear some music from her album Going off Script: the Ornamented Suites for cello. 

Juliana shared great advice about performing  from an athlete’s perspective and also the joy of connecting with  audiences. This interview begins with one of her beautiful greyhounds, and for those of you watching this on YouTube, hopefully you’ll enjoy this comforting canine presence throughout this inspirational conversation. Like all my episodes , you can watch the video or listen to the podcast on all the podcast platforms, and I’ve also linked the transcript