Perhaps after three weeks of “March Winds,” some of you are wondering why a viola player would spend a whole month collecting and sharing information about wind players and their chamber music repertoire. 

I feel like everyone has an instrument that is their destiny, and those of us who find the right one are so fortunate. I remember the short lived clarinet career of my older sister when we were both kids. It was not the right fit, and she was having trouble even putting the thing together. My mother, who knew even less about the clarinet, was trying to help her while spinning Acker Bilk’s LP Call Me Mister on our turntable. I think, maybe, that didn’t help!

I was lucky to find my soul mate, the viola, at the age of nine through the Vancouver Schools String Program. As one does, I mainly played with other strings and piano. For one year I was a member of the Vancouver Youth Symphony, but for me the winds were just kind of there in the background. It didn’t even register to me that they were the featured soloists most of the time.

When I moved to Belgium as a teenager, I joined the Brussels Youth Symphony and became close friends with the oboist Sylvain Jeanmart. We formed a group to play the Mozart Oboe Quartet – and we played it all the time! We even got some gigs at local restaurants where we played in exchange for food. Sylvain was my first wind player friend, and I learned about the challenges of making and adjusting reeds, the volatilities of reeds to weather changes, and most importantly – not being able to eat right before or while playing.

I went straight from Belgium to Houston, Texas to do my undergraduate degree in viola performance at Rice University. Full disclosure: Stephanie Zelnick, who wrote the article Irreverent Friends, the True Inspiration Behind Clarinet’s Chamber Music Gems for the ACMP blog, became one of my closest friends. Stephanie invited me into a world of clarinet music beyond Acker Bilk. I got to hear her practice the Copland Clarinet Concerto, and through her I gained an appreciation for the level of responsibility (and stress) of being an orchestral clarinetist. Most importantly we formed a trio with pianist Max Midroit, with the working band name “Steph to the Max” – later to be called the Feldspar Trio, as a reference to the “Rocks for Jocks” (intro to geology) class the two Stephanies took for science credit. We played Mozart’s famous Kegelstatt Trio and Bruch’s Romantic Pieces, and even “commissioned” a brand new piece by Rice University undergraduate composer Gabriela Lena Frank.

Stephanie and I went on to put a group together to learn both the Mozart and Brahms Clarinet Quintets, which remain to this day two of my all-time favorite chamber pieces.

Through Stephanie, I learned so much about how the breath informs phrasing. Sometimes I felt like I was scratching away at my viola while the music just seemed to flow so naturally through her. Later in life I learned that vocal and wind teachers actually use the bow as an analogy for breath, and I was reminded of this by flutist Jayn Rosenfeld’s recent article On coaching mixed chamber music with winds . All of us musicians can learn so much by listening to and especially playing with musicians who produce sound in a completely different way than we do!

Playing with winds, brass, piano and percussion can cure us string players of our assumptions about articulations. Working with wind players as a violist and later as a composer, I have really come to accept that there is nothing universal about a dash or a dot, or even a slur. And the ways most string players interpret strings of notes with no slurs or articulation markings is vastly different from what wind players do. When I wrote my first pieces for winds, I generally wrote too many staccati. In the early rehearsals for my piece For Sameena (2023) for two oboes, clarinet and viola, I ended up removing almost all of them, and adding dashes in many places to get the smooth sustain into the next note that I envisioned. Where a string player might play a smooth détaché, a wind player would tongue. It seems like the default for an unslurred and unmarked note in the winds is much shorter than how we string players perceive it.

Adding dashes to notes for wind players might produce more of what we string players call détaché, whereas dashes for string players can mean conflicting things. Do dashes denote a seamless connection between notes, or more of a portato where the bow keeps moving but the sound is not sustained?

Then, of course, if you ever get to play 20th- or 21st-century music with winds, you will find notations that mean completely different things. For example, what a string player would interpret as tremolo on a single pitch is a flutter tongue effect on the flute, which can be very dramatic. Can one pluck a flute? Not quite – but they do play pizzicato!

As a composer and violist, perhaps what fascinates me most about the wind instruments is the way in which dynamics and colors are so intricately linked to register, and how timbre can affect one’s perception of register. Flutist Roberta Michel pointed out to me, for example, that the alto flute is the violin of the flute family, with its low G – yet it sounds much more like a viola. Conversely, what may seem like very high notes to most of us is the mellow low register of the piccolo.

Writing my duet For Joni (2024) for alto flute and viola really brought this home for me. I had the opportunity to workshop the piece with flutist Tessa Brinckman in the lead up to our premiere of the piece in January 2024. In rehearsals I made many changes to the dynamics and it became a different piece than I had originally imagined. Especially in the opening material, which recurs throughout the piece, what I had originally intended to have more brilliance took on a sweeter character, more like the cooing of doves.

Choreographer Sameena Mitta eventually choreographed the piece, which I programmed again (with her MeenMoves dancers) on the 2025 Momenta Festival as part of a whole program celebrating chamber music with flute called program “Tutti Flutey.” Along with my duet, the program featured Mozart’s G minor flute quartet, a gorgeous quintet for flute and string quartet Blue Minor (2001) by Elizabeth Brown, and the US premiere of modernist composer Kaihosru Sorabji’s Il tessuto d’arabeschi (1979).