ABBA

She is a tubist, musicologist and teacher who was born into a family where her father is an amateur jazz musician and the 12^th President of Chicago University.

She took her further studies in the tuba at the University of Kentucky, where she gained her masters degree, her musicology masters degree came from the University of Georgia and her attendance at Yale earned her a BA in literature in 1993. She went on to be awarded the Oscar S. Schafer Award and the John Knowles Paine Traveling Fellowship and gain her doctorate in musicology at Harvard.

Her tuba performances have seen her playing as a member of the Holden Consort Orchestra and Choir in 2001, as the music director of Dudley House Orchestra at Harvard from 2000 to 2001 and as a member of The Harvard Brass, with whom she performed on the recording Christmas in the Busch.

In the field of music education she has been a teacher at the University of Georgia and Harvard and has most recently been a member of the Hope College faculty where she is an Assistant Professor of Music. She has also published some of her research and given presentations at the Balanchine centennial symposium and to the Society of Dance History Scholars and the American Musicological Society.

She lives in Holland, Michigan with her daughter and husband, Jimmy Leach, who is a trumpeter, music director and professor at the Grand Valley State University.

The Harvard Brass recordings

Adeste Fidelis (Frederick Oakeley/John Francis Wade)

Pro Organo CD 7134 (Christmas in the Busch)

The Harvard University Choir

Conductor – Murray Forbes Somerville

Harvard Baroque Chamber Orchestra

Director – Robert Mealy

Soprano – Awet Andemicael

Bass – Mark Risinger

Organists – Erica Johnson and Edward Jones

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