Who am I?

I am a composer that also happens to have six children that I try to look after. I say this humorously. Of course, as a deliberately unschooling mom, my days are filled with the joys of helping them learn, making sure they have food to eat, have clean clothes to wear, and can get to the gym when they need to, etc. Some of my works have been inspired by these experiences. On this website, I share the music that I write, and talk about music.

I am a singer (soprano), and I have conducted choir. I play the piano, the viola, and the fiddle. I always talk about the violin as the fiddle when I play, because I mostly use it to play folk music, and if I play classical, it’s on the viola, not the fiddle. I love Swedish folk music, and I treasure the time I had playing with Umeå spelmanslag in 2014-2015. I am currently playing with the Timpanogos Symphony Orchestra.

As a student, I was inspired by Anton Webern. Some of my music has been twelve-tone, and I love the challenge of the twelve-tone vocal line. I have also loved singing with the Group for Experimental Music during my time at Brigham Young University (BYU), and performing in Sunset with Pink Pastoral by Christian Asplund in 2005. Another composer that has inspired me is Béla Bartók, and I had the great fortune to participate in a choir festival named after him in Budapest, Hungary, in 1997.

One of my earliest teachers was Anne Aaltonen Samuelsson. She taught music and choir to the children in the music program at Nyboda skola, also known as Tyresö Musikklasser, a suburb of Stockholm, Sweden. She led the girls’ choir to Hungary, and she also kept giving us new arrangements and new compositions by Bror Samuelsson, which often were in a hand-written font. I loved the music we sang, and the font reminded me, as APM does, that “all music was once new,” but ours was often fairly new. This taught me that I should expect to perform new music, and I wish all musicians could have such an introduction to the music world.

I love to take on new challenges. Please talk to me if you’d like me to write something for you or your ensemble, or for your film.