Bassoonist

Bassoonist • Educator • Social Worker

Midori has been a member of the Wisconsin Chamber Orchestra since 2016, and previously won positions with the Arkansas, Lubbock, and Beloit-Janesville symphony orchestras. She is a former Fellow of the Civic Orchestra of Chicago, a training program of the Chicago Symphony that involved orchestral, chamber, and solo performance engagements alongside social justice community projects and fellow-led initiatives. She has performed as a guest bassoonist and contrabassoonist in the Chicago, Omaha, Madison, Charleston, Austin, South Dakota, Dubuque, Quad Cities, and New World symphony orchestras.  

Midori’s festival appearances include Pacific Music Festival (Japan), Flying Carpet Children’s Festival (Turkey), Banff Centre (Canada), New York String Orchestra Seminar, National Orchestral Institute, Norfolk Music Festival at the Yale School of Music, Bowdoin International Music Festival, Boston Festival Orchestra, Caroga Arts Collective, LunART, and Maryland Chamber Winds. Her solo recital appearances include the Ubumuntu Arts Festival (Rwanda), Africa Institute of Music (Uganda), International Double Reed Society, Philippine Consulate, Music by Women Festival, and Fishkill Ridge Creative Arts Retreat. Concerto appearances include collaborations with the Nairobi Orchestra, Illinois State University Wind Symphony, University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point Wind Ensemble, and performances as the winner of concerto competitions for both the University of Wisconsin-Madison Orchestra and Wind Ensemble. 

Most proudly, Midori has commissioned and premiered twelve solos by composers from countries across Africa, as well as eight solos by composers from Uganda through a residency with the Uganda Art Music Society, founded by Job Ivan Tezigatwa. She continues to champion these works through frequent recital performances and through a grassroots sheet music distribution program on this website.

Midori finds opportunities to connect her intersecting identities with her music-making through sound art composition. Recent composition projects include electroacoustic pieces that explore multi-racial acceptance, sexual identity, resilience, intergenerational trauma, and war. Her compositions have been featured in exhibitions and live performances through the Belgrade Art Studio (Serbia), XinSai Magazine (Hong Kong), Berkeley Poetry Review, Old Pal Magazine, Bi Women Quarterly, University of Michigan School of Social Work, Communication Gallery Madison, International Double Reed Society, Music by Women Festival, SHE Festival at the University of Arkansas, and the International Symposium for Autoethnography and Narrative, and Studio Montclair, as well as in a short film in collaboration with Iranian puppet maker, Torfeh Ekhlasi.

Midori holds degrees in bassoon performance from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (Doctor of Musical Arts), University of Texas at Austin (Master of Music), and The Juilliard School (Bachelor of Music). She is indebted to her mentors that shaped her personally and musically: Lyle Dockendorff, Rebecca Simmons, Evan Kuhlmann, Frank Morelli, Kristin Wolfe Jensen, William Buchman, and Marc Vallon.

“Midori defines herself as a bassoonist, an educator, an activist and a scholar, an ambitious and challenging proposition. What is amazing about her is that she does excel in all these fields. She is the first-class artist and a passionate pedagogue. Her dedication and commitment to the field work and theoretical basis of social/artistic activism make her a paragon of the 21st-century musician. In the two years she has spent at UW- Madison as a DMA student, she has had a profound influence on her peers as well as on the faculty who worked with her. Midori is a truly amazing person and musician and I feel privileged, as many of my colleagues do, to have had the chance to cross her path.”

-Marc Vallon, Professor of Bassoon at the University of Wisconsin–Madison