ALUMNI UPDATE: ADRIENNE INGLIS Composer & Musician

Posted on February 28, 2020

(PYP 1980 - 1982)

If you ask Adrienne Inglis about learning piano and flute in Berkeley as a child or about her music degrees from Lewis and Clark College and University of Texas at Austin, make sure she’s not near a window because she’s easily distracted by birds and will stop speaking suddenly if she sees one. It won’t surprise you, then, that her compositions often include bird sounds.

Luckily, her family history research draws her to other topics too, such as her Ojibwe, Venezuelan, Scottish, and colonial roots. Her choral, chamber, and orchestral compositions also sometimes explore nature, scripture, Shakespeare, and bugs. She lives in the rural hill country of central Texas, where she freelances, teaches flute at Southwestern University and plays principal flute for the Central Texas Philharmonic. She does put down her binoculars to perform, record, and tour with flute/harp duo, Chaski, and to compose and sing with the Inversion Ensemble.

Adrienne played in PYP during her years at Lewis & Clark College beginning in January 1980 and ending in May 1982. She remembers, “my years with PYP helped me understand the musical breadth of symphonic music and how profoundly it affects musicians and audience alike. Performing Ballade by Frank Martin (as flute soloist), Prélude à l’après midi d’une faune by Claude Debussy (as principal flute), and The Rite of Spring by Stravinsky with PYP inspired my passionate love of performing. I have performed, transcribed, and arranged music since my PYP days and started composing after my mother died in 1997. I wrote my first piece in her memory, and have continued composing ever since.”

“As both a composer and performer, I want my music to invite the listener into a shared musical experience in which our common hopes, joys, and sorrows mingle with familiar texts, haunting modalities, and folk rhythms. Weaving voices with harp, flutes, and guitars brings together beautiful aural colors in an acoustical setting. My compositional process usually starts with a carefully selected text of scripture, poetry, or liturgy. The text itself suggests its own rhythmic underpinning, musical architecture, and melodic shape. I may challenge myself to compose in a certain modality or meter that I feel best suits the material.

As a member of the music ensemble, Chaski, I collaborate with my colleagues to select, transcribe, arrange, rehearse, and perform programs that inspire mutual understanding and learning. As a composer and singer in Austin’s C4-affliated choral collective, Inversion Ensemble, I regularly contribute new works and sing my colleague’s compositions.”

Links to Adrienne’s extensive catalog of compositions can be found on her website.