Artist Statement

My musical practice is a continuous inquiry into lineage — a sustained conversation with the past and with the long line of musicians who have used breath to speak across borders and eras. Born in Philadelphia in 1971, I came of age during a moment of geopolitical rupture. When the Soviet Union fell, I was twenty. Yet even earlier, at fourteen, playing my first Tchaikovsky symphony, I understood something essential: music collapses time. Through sound, I could feel the emotions of people whose histories were entangled with mine, and those emotions were recognized and valued by my peers. Music offered a neutral ground, a space where presence of other cultures, and respect for them, was palpable. 

As I matured, however, performance alone began to feel insufficient — too distant from the fractures shaping the world around me. This disquiet led me to Europe more than two decades ago to study music written in the aftermath of the Second World War. In 1946, supported by the Frankfurt School, composition and aesthetics underwent an ideological break, seeking to dismantle authoritarianism in all its forms. My practice became a kind of decoding: decoding the unconscious, the score, the composer. I began to ask how much authoritarianism is embedded in notation itself, and how much of it we continue to carry in our bodies.

I am drawn to works of extremes — extreme demands on breath, body, and presence. Breath became my central material: its meaning, its audibility, its vulnerability. Sport science offered unexpected insights, enabling me to develop new approaches to music instruction that adapt to different personalities, psychologies, and bodies.

A turning point came when I met someone who had known my great‑grandmother. She had taught underground. The questions I had been pursuing — about authority, resistance, breath, and survival — were not abstract inquiries. They were inherited.

For me, the flute is the act of breathing life into a cold body. My work seeks to make that breath visible: as history, as resistance, autonomy and humanity.