Fifteen-Minutes-of-Fame featuring Kristen Mather de Andrade

Lightbulb moments can strike at any time. Eclectic virtuosic clarinetist Kristen Mather de Andrade had reached a career milestone in being years into a career as the principal clarinetist with the West Point Band when she had a seismic artistic epiphany. After playing a program of Brazilian music on a livestream, she decided it was time to record her full-length debut album, aptly-titled "Clarão" which translates from Portuguese to mean "flash of light."


 This fresh outlet of releasing her own recorded music has been transformative, and Kristen has since released a five-song Christmas music EP, "Evergreen" consisting of four less obvious Christmas carols and one original composition, "Union Square," written by Annie Pasqua who lends her voice to the exquisite song. "Evergreen" arrived months after the summer release of her critically hailed debut album, "Clarão" and is a bridge to a new summer release in 2022 entitled "As Bright As The Skies Are Blue" which features the work she commissioned by composer David Reeves for clarinet and percussion. 


Kristen has enjoyed a career of prime accolades and acclaim within her chosen musical paths, but these days music feels as vital as ever as she explores being a solo artist. Not only has stepping into the spotlight as a solo recording artist broadened her artistic experience, but it has opened up her mind to previously unimagined creative possibilities, expanding and diversifying her musical palate. 
 
More can be found at:
More can be found at: https://kristenmather.com/

Fifteen-Minutes-of-Fame featuring Kristen Mather de Andrade

  • Moment for solo clarinet

    Beth Anderson

    Moment for solo clarinet is a piece decoded from the text that begins the dedicatee’s biography: “Lightbulb moments can strike at any time.” There are six sequential decodings of this sentence. Each statement uses a code having one less pitch available. The coding system modulates.

    Beth Anderson (www.beand.com) is a composer of new romantic music, text-sound works, and music theater events. Her early work was considered post-Cagian, non-academic but more recently, the music became more lyrical while retaining the cut-up quality of the minimalists. Her CDs are available on MSR, New World, Albany and Pogus.

  • Summer Miniature III

    Michalis Andronikou

    Summer Miniature III was composed spontaneously for Kristen Mather de Andrade, and Vox Novus, on a warm day in August, in Calgary, AB, Canada.

    Michalis Andronikou is a composer and musicologist currently residing in Calgary, AB. He holds a PhD in composition and is interested primarily in acoustic chamber music.

  • Clear Tin

    David Bohn

    David Bohn received degrees in composition from the University of Wisconsin, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and the University of Illinois. He currently resides in West Allis, Wisconsin, and is the music coordinator at Peace Methodist Church in Brookfield. He is the President of the Wisconsin Alliance for Composers.

  • O vôo do curiango” (“The Flight of the Nighthawk”)

    Erik Branch

    The title “O vôo do curiango” (“The Flight of the Nighthawk”) was suggested by the combination of circling and rapid upward runs, remindful of the swooping and soaring of birds, and the obsessive use of the melodic minor modes, which I often associate with a nocturnal, sultry, and tropical atmosphere.

    ERIK BRANCH is a native of New York City, and received a BA and MA in Music (Composition) from Hunter College. He lives near Orlando, Florida, where he is active as a pianist, musical director, composer/arranger, operatic tenor, and actor on stage and screen.

  • Ghosts and Blossoms

    Jim Dalton

    I have loved this quote from Thomas Mann ever since I first read Doctor Faustus. He obviously had a deep love of music and beautiful ways of expressing it. The intriguing idea of singing instrumentalists in concert music gave me a vehicle for his words.

    American composer Jim Dalton is a professor of music theory at Boston Conservatory at Berklee. His works are performed frequently throughout the US, Canada, and Europe, including Musique Nouvelles, Lunel, France; Kansas Symposium of New Music; Sound: Scotland’s Festival of New Music; and Akademie der Tonkunst (Darmstadt, Germany).

  • A Rede

    Douglas DaSilva

    A Rede is inspired by a piece that I composed over 30 years ago using a broken guitar while sweating in the Fortaleza sun in Brazil. A Rede borrows its theme but is harmonically and melodically new while maintaining the espirito nordestino of the original.

    Composer, guitarist, educator, filmmaker, Douglas DaSilva composes in various styles including jazz, pop and chamber music. Much of his writing is influenced by Brazilian music and self-inflicted stress. His extensive work with children keeps him sane; giving him the opportunity to share his love for music with future generations.

  • The Night’s Lullaby

    Jorien Van Delm

    The Night’s Lullaby is inspired on the music philosophy of the ancient Greeks. They believed the cosmos made music by itself and that's why they did musical research to understand it. The idea that the cosmos makes music sounds magical to me, so I composed it in fantasy style.

    Jorien Van Delm was born in Belgium the fifteenth of February 1997. She learned to compose at a summer camp when she was seventeen. Later she took composition classes. Despite her young age, she won second place in a small competition in Belgium and composed for the Belgian JEF-Festival.

  • December Reflection

    Geoffrey Hudson

    “December Reflection” was composed on the morning after the first snow of the year. The snow lies still upon the ground, a bright new canvas. Silence in the trees. Perhaps some of that is reflected in the music—perhaps not.

    Geoffrey Hudson’s music has been performed around the world. His 2019 eco-oratorio A Passion for the Planet is an hour-long meditation on the subject of climate change. His six-volume collection The Quartet Project has been recorded by leading American ensembles like the Chiara, Jupiter, Parker, Miró, and Lark quartets. geoffreystephenhudson.com

  • Swing Set

    Rob Knable

    This piece is an exploration of the different registers of the clarinet, using a loose, light-hearted romp through swing-land. There are four distinct registers: chalumeau (low, dark), throat tones (lighter, airy), clarion (higher, brighter), and altissimo (very high, thinner).

    Bio: composer, woodwind performer (clarinet, saxophone, and flute) in a variety of genres – classical, musical theater, jazz. Professor of music for 35 years.

  • Remember Yesterday?

    Travis Maslen

    “Remember Yesterday?” is a new work composed specifically for clarinetist Kristen Mather de Andrade. The sixty-second work utilizes silence between the short eighth-note phrases evoking memories of the recent past. The three vocal passages also echo the memory of the past with gentle humming.

    Travis Maslen is in his twenty-eighth year as a music educator and his nineteenth year as a high school band/ orchestra director from Sacramento, California. As a composer and arranger, Travis has created works in the classical, pop, and jazz genres for instrumental and choral ensembles, both large and small.

  • Ação de Graças

    Melanie Mitrano

    The leadsheet score of Ação de Graças (Thanksgiving) allows for it to be performed unaccompanied (a cappella) or with any light harmonic accompaniment desired by the performer. The Brazilian Portuguese text is a tableau of emotional fatigue and loneliness, set against the backdrop of a stagnant late-Autumn day.

    Melanie Mitrano is an award-winning ASCAP composer-vocalist who works across many genres. Fluent in Portuguese, she pens and performs her own Brazilian-inspired songs. Melanie is a graduate of the Eastman School of Music and holds MM and DMA degrees from the New England Conservatory.

  • Estampa

    Pete Strohm

    "Estampa" was created for Kristen Mather de Andrade, and draws from her work with Brazilian music. In that spirit, I attempted to imprint this one-minute solo with a feeling of fatalistic happiness. Though brief, the piece exploits the full range and capabilities of the instrument and artist.

    Member of ASCAP and lives near Seattle, Washington. He's written extensively for brass, with numerous other works for woodwinds, strings, voice and ensembles. Visit petestrohm.com or www.youtube.com/@pete.strohm for more.

  • Tiny Prelude

    Fabian Svensson

    This is the first movement of an imagined, as-of-yet non-existent, suite for solo clarinet, where each movement is the length of a single page or less, as succinct and compressed as I'm able to make them. Perhaps one day I'll write the remaining movements. Perhaps not.

    Swedish composer whose interests include toy instruments, electric guitars, and relentless energy. Among other things. His music has been described by the New York Times as “dazzling” and by the Los Angeles Times as “an odd merger of Bartók and Radiohead.”

  • Youngstown, Ohio.

    Matthew Williamson

    On the forested banks of the Mahoning river, a city is striving to reinvent and rejuvenate itself after years of pollution and the collapse of its coal and steel industries. Pastoral flavours combine with life-affirming Latin rhythms to express the hope, joy and potential of a community united by music.

    Matthew Williamson is from London, England. He's been writing music as a hobby for over 20 years but is now looking to fulfil a dream and launch a professional career as a composer. His music has recently been performed at the Louvre, Paris. https://mwilliamson-composer.com/

  • Flying Solo

    Mark Zuckerman

    Flying Solo gathers the energy to get and, eventually, stay aloft.

    Mark Zuckerman (b. 1948) has written extensively for virtuoso soloists, chamber ensembles, choirs, wind ensemble, orchestra, and string orchestra, with work acclaimed as “intriguing music of deceptive simplicity ... subtle, persuasive and, quite simply, beautiful” and “highly accessible … quite moving.”