Artist/Staff Profile: Kathryn Mishell

Piano, Composer

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Artistic Director, Salon Concerts; Composer-in-residence, Armstrong Community Music School of Austin Lyric Opera

Kathryn Mishell was born in Los Angeles, where she received her early musical training. Her college and graduate work were done at Pomona College, The University of Kansas, and the University of Southern California. During these years she was a piano student of John Perry and a composition student of John Pozdro and then Ingolf Dahl.

Ms. Mishell's works include over a hundred piano pieces, ensemble and orchestral works, and music for chorus, dance and theatre. Her published collections of pieces for piano students have sold thousands of copies nationwide. She is one of two women composers honored by the National League of American Pen Women in 1996. She was the 1997 commissioned composer of the Texas Music Teachers Association, and has received ASCAP awards for the past several years. Her most recent commissions include chamber works for Trio Contraste, Chamber Soloists of Austin, the Arundel Trio, and Pacific Serenades of Los Angeles, and Musiques en Euroreígion. She is Composer-in Residence for Austin Lyric Opera's Armstrong Community Music School.

Ms. Mishell is producer and host of Into the Light, a weekly radio program devoted to the music of women composers, now in its ninth year. Produced at KMFA, the fine arts station in Austin; it has won three international Communicator Awards of Distinction for excellence in broadcasting. Mishell has also won a 2007 Gracie Allen Award for outstanding portrait/biography in public radio.

As pianist, Ms. Mishell has performed extensively in the U.S. and Mexico as a soloist and in chamber music. She has been touring pianist for the Sharir Dance Company, and for the music dramas Paganini! and Heroes and Lovers, for which she wrote the incidental music. She is a regular performer on Salon Concerts in Austin.

A teacher of many award-winning young pianists, Ms. Mishell has taught at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music and has acted as clinician, adjudicator, and as consultant in the use of computers in music instruction. She maintains a large class of private piano students in Austin, where she has twice been awarded the Outstanding Pre-collegiate Teaching Award.

Links
Into the Light
Sundays at 9 p.m. U.S. Central time
Produced and hosted by Kathryn Mishell, this weekly radio program presents a selection of the finest music of the past and present written by women composers. The program is produced at and streamed over the Internet by KMFA, the fine arts station in Austin.

Discography
Available from amazon.com

Kathryn Mishell: Musical Voyages
Pierian Recording Society-Pierian 0014
Kennan|Reipe|White|Mishell|Oquin|Welcher
Centaur CRC2525

Mishell likes to confound expectations, steering the dissonant fugue of the opening movement toward compassionate lyricism before heading back into a storm, or having the lovely Romanticized rhetoric of the slow movement turn bleak with a shivering wind of tremolos.
The Los Angeles Times (on String Quartet No. 2)

Kathryn Mishell's music runs the gamut from simple to complex - often in the same piece - and always with both heart and skill.
Katherine Hoover

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