Texas Toot - Texas Toot

Jody Miller

Jody Miller has taught recorder and early music for over thirty years. While he enjoys performing, he is best known as a recorder pedagogue and is in demand as a teacher and consort coach. His early study was with Steve Rosenburg (recorder) of the College of Charleston and Dana Ragsdale (harpsichord) of the University of Southern Mississippi. Additional studies were with Marion Verbruggen, Eva Legêne, Aldo Abreu, and Frances Blaker.

Jody is Music Director of Lauda Musicam of Atlanta, a large community-based ensemble comprised of a 40-piece Renaissance band, a Baroque orchestra, a capped reed ensemble, a brass reed ensemble, a viol ensemble, and a flute ensemble. When Lauda Musicam of Austin was formed as a sister organization he helped shaped the direction of the ensemble. He has been Director of Mountain Collegium Early Music and Folk Music Workshop since 2011. During that time he has expanded the workshop to be one of the largest in the country, with programs for early brass and reeds and for emerging recorder and viol players. Jody has taught at workshops throughout the country, including San Francisco Early Music Society Workshop, Bloom Early Music Workshop, and Amherst Early Music Festival Online Workshop. He regularly travels to Greensboro, NC, to lead the Triad Early Music Society and he maintains a large recorder studio at his home in Marietta, GA.

Jody is a member of Amethyst Baroque Ensemble and Sol Divino 17^th Century Ensemble. His orchestral performances include the Victoria (TX) Bach Festival, Cincinnati Opera, New Trinity Baroque Orchestra, Atlanta Baroque Orchestra, Atlanta Opera, and Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. As a supporter of new music for the recorder, he works closely with composer Timothy Broege and has given several premier performances of Broege’s compositions. In 2022, Miller performed Gregory Hamilton’s new work for unaccompanied recorder, Ave Maria Variations.

Rosamund Morley

Viol

On treble, tenor and bass violas da gamba, and their medieval ancestors, Rosamund Morley has performed with many distinguished early music ensembles as diverse as ARTEK, The Boston Camerata, Piffaro, The Catacoustic Consort, Sequentia and Les Arts Florissants. She is a member of Parthenia, New York’s premiere consort of viols, and a founding member of the Elizabethan ensemble My Lord Chamberlain’s Consort. For many years she toured worldwide with the Waverly Consort and she developed an interest in contemporary music while playing with the New York Consort of Viols.

Her busy teaching schedule has included numerous national and international workshops such as Charney Manor and the Benslow Music Trust in Hitchin, UK, Triora Musica in Liguria, Italy, the Cammac Music Center in Quebec, Amherst Early Music in New England, the Port Townsend workshop in Seattle and the annual conclave of the Viola da Gamba Society of America. She directs the Viols West Workshop in San Luis Obispo, California and teaches the viol consort for the Collegium Musicum at Yale University.

Stephanie Noori

Viol

Stephanie Raby Noori was first inspired by authentic historical performance as a girl living in England. During her undergrad years at the University of North Texas, she was presented with the unique opportunity to study the field, and it was there that she learned about the viola da gamba.

Her studies as a baroque violinist with Cynthia Roberts and as gambist with Patricia Nordstrom and Allen Whear had such an impact that she went on to complete a Master’s in Early Music at Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music. Throughout her time there she was privileged to study with Stanley Ritchie (violin) and Wendy Gillespie (viol), among others.

Currently Ms. Noori is an active violinist, violist, and gamba player performing with such groups as Mountainside Baroque, La Follia Austin Baroque, Texas Early Music Project, and Queen City Musicians, as well as a founding member of Les Touches Viol Consort.

Wendy Powers

Early notation, Recorder

Wendy Powers has played and taught recorder in New York City for many years, and is a musicologist specializing in music of the late 15th and early 16th centuries, particularly in Italy and France. She received her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1994. She is an assistant director and faculty member of the Amherst Early Music Festival, and has taught at early music workshops across the U. S.

Since 2011, she has co-directed (with Valerie Horst) Amherst Early Music’s CityRecorder workshop in New York City. In the fall of 2008 she was adjunct assistant professor of music at Vassar College. She has written about musical instruments for the Metropolitan Museum of Art Timeline of Art History www.metmuseum.org). She sat for twenty-eight years on the Board of Directors of the New York City series Music Before 1800, and is currently on the board of the American Recorder Society.

Ms. Powers is adjunct assistant professor at the Aaron Copland School of Music at Queens College of the City University of New York, where she teaches music history; she has also taught early music notation and co-directed (with Susan Hellauer) the Early Music Collective at QC.

Susan Richter

Administrator

In the early music world, Susan Richter’s primary instruments are recorders and Renaissance double reeds: shawms and dulcians. Susan also enjoys singing in various church and early music groups. She has been a performing member of Texas Early Music Project (TEMP), St. David’s (Episcopal Church, Austin) Compline Choir, and the Austin Baroque Orchestra, and teaches adult beginning recorder at Austin’s Lifetime Learning Institute.

Susan is on the board of TEMP, was a Board member of the ARS 2008-2012, is a music leader at Central Presbyterian Church in Austin, and is Administrator of the Texas Toot early music workshops. She enjoys tending her wild Hill Country yard, feeding and watching birds, and occasionally playing penny whistle duets with her husband, Win Bent. Susan is now happily retired from gainful IT employment.

Glen Shannon

Recorder

Glen Shannon is a composer and recorder enthusiast living in El Cerrito, CA where he is a member of the East Bay (CA) Recorder Society and Co-Director of the Barbary Coast Recorder Orchestra. His compositions have won prizes in contests since 1997, sponsored by the Chicago and Washington, DC Recorder Societies, and the ARS/Amsterdam Loeki Stardust Quartet. Tom Beets and Joris Van Goethem of the former Flanders Recorder Quartet have commissioned works from him, most recently the Bass-Contrabass duet “Slingshot” featured on their award-winning first CD as the duo FR2.

Glen publishes his music under his own name at www.glenshannonmusic.com, and has also had works published by Moeck Verlag, PRB Productions, Loux Music Publishing Company, Peacock Press, the ARS, and the European recorder magazines Recorder in the UK, Windkanal in Germany, and Blokfluitist in the Netherlands. Performances of some of his works can be found on YouTube at www.youtube.com/@glenshannon.

Glen is active in the American Recorder Society as editor of the quarterly Members’ Library Editions, a series introducing new recorder music to the worldwide membership, and is the editor and producer of the annual ARS Play-the-Recorder-Month piece that appears with the Winter edition of the American Recorder magazine. In October 2021 Glen received the ARS Presidential Special Honor Award, recognizing a person who has had a significant positive impact on the recorder community in North America.

Frank Shirley – In Memoriam

Recorder

Dr. Frank Shirley holds a Master of Music degree in musicology from the University of Texas, where as a Ph.D. in mathematics he teaches courses in math for non-math majors. He has performed in early music ensembles in Ithaca NY, Dallas, and Austin, and has taught for several years at the Fall and Summer Toots. He has studied recorder in workshops with Saskia Coolen, Reine-Marie Verhagen, and Aldo Abreu. In addition, Dr. Shirley has performed as a bass chorister in the UT Early Music Ensemble, the Austin Civic Chorus, the Victoria Bach Festival, and the Dallas area Renaissance Polyphony Weekend.

Frank passed away in December 2024, and is sorely missed by his friends and colleagues in both the musical and academic/mathematics worlds. Madrigals will not be the same without his love and enthusiasm

Mary Springfels

Viol

For most of her adult life, Mary Springfels had devoted herself to the performance and teaching of early music repertoires. She earned her stripes performing with many influential pioneering ensembles, including the New York Pro Musica, the Elizabethan Enterprise, concert Royal, and the Waverly consort.

For 20 years she directed the innovative Newberry Consort, and can be heard on dozens of recordings. In 2006, Mary moved to the mountains of New Mexico, where she is active in the formation of an intentional community called the Wit’s End Coop. She continues to teach and perform extensively. Most recently, she has taught at the San Francisco Early Music Society, The Viola da Gamba Society of America, Amherst Early Music, and the Pinewoods Early Music Week.

Jenifer Thyssen

Voice

After studying voice with Ms. Gilda Cruz-Romo at the University of Texas in Austin, Jenifer Thyssen has turned her focus to early music, continuing her vocal study with Ms. Sylvia Gallo of Austin and stylistic coaching with Mr. Daniel Johnson, director and founder of Texas Early Music Project (TEMP). Jenifer has had the privilege of studying under such notables as Julianne Baird, Jennifer Lane, Howard Crook, and Drew Minter, leading to her particular interest and specialization in music of the Baroque period.

Jenifer was honored with an award for Best Female Classical Singer by the Austin American-Statesman’s Austin Critics Table Awards 2003. Her popularity among concert-goers has afforded her a considerable reputation for thrilling and beautiful performances, earning her many opportunities to perform throughout Texas.

Jenifer has had the privilege of singing with some of the top early-music performers in the nation: Laurie Young-Stevens, violin, Saskia Coolen and Frances Blaker, recorder, Tom Zajac, multi-instrumentalist and Stanley Ritchie, violin. Jenifer also had the privilege of performing the Texas debut of the recently “rediscovered” Handel Gloria with Laurie-Young Stevens, concertmistress, who performed in the world debut of the piece.

You may hear her on The Bonny Broom and Other Scottish Ballads, Texas Early Music Project’s first recording, and various other concert recordings of TEMP productions. Jenifer resides in Austin, TX.

Héctor Torres

Lute/theorbo

Dr. Héctor Alfonso Torres González was born in Puerto Rico, where he started his guitar studies at the Preparatory School of the Puerto Rico Music Conservatory. He worked on his bachelor’s degree at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras Campus; his master’s degree at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee; and his doctorate in musical arts degree with a specialization in early music at the University of North Texas.

Héctor has concertized and taught throughout the United States, Puerto Rico, South America, Europe, and China, both as a soloist and ensemble musician. Distinguished by his versatility and sound, he frequently performs many styles of music, including early music, Latin music, and modern classical. As an early music performer, he regularly plays baroque guitar, theorbo, lute, and other period plucked instruments with different chamber groups and orchestras across the U.S, including the Texas Early Music Project, Austin Baroque Orchestra & Chorus, Ars Lyrica Houston, Lumedia Musicworks, La Follia, Mercury Chamber Orchestra, Fantasmi, Camerata del Sol, Red River Lyric Opera, Orchestra of New Spain, and his newly founded group Bambulaé Barrocá.

Currently Dr. Torres-González serves as an Associate Professor of Music at Tarrant County College – Trinity River Campus located in downtown Fort Worth, Texas.

Brent Wissick

Viol

Brent Wissick is the Zachary Taylor Smith Distinguished Term Professor in the Department of Music at UNC-CH, where he has taught cello, viola da gamba and chamber music since 1982. A member of Ensemble Chanterelle and principal cellist of the Atlanta Baroque Orchestra, he is also a frequent guest with early music performing groups throughout the US and internationally. He has recorded for the Centaur, Albany, Koch, Radio Bremen, Bard and Dux labels as well as in the soundtrack for the Touchstone film “Casanova”. He served as president of the Viola da Gamba Society of America from 2000 through 2004 and chaired its international Pan-Pacific Gamba Gathering in Hawaii during the summer of 2007.

Wissick’s current research and performance interests include the cello music of Benjamin Britten, Chopin’s Cello Music on period instruments and French Gamba Music. A graduate of the Crane School of Music at Potsdam College in NY and of Penn State (MM cello, 1978), he also studied with John Hsu at Cornell University and was an NEH Fellow at Harvard in the 1993 Beethoven Quartet Seminar. He has taught at the College of St Scholastica in Minnesota (1978-82), Chautauqua Institution and the 1997 Aston Magna Academy at Yale; and has presented lectures, master classes and recitals at schools, colleges and workshops throughout North America, Europe, Asia and Australia.

Sydney ZumMallen

Viol

Texas based baroque cellist and viola da gamba player, Sydney ZumMallen, is currently a doctoral candidate at UT Austin. As an active performer, you can find her playing with many baroque ensembles including Harmonia Stellarum, La Follia Baroque, American Baroque Opera Company, and many more. She is also a proud founder of the Early Birds Baroque Ensemble. Sydney has been part of multiple recording projects including the Dallas Bach Society’s Messiah, Dallas Bach Society’s St John Passion, and Rebecca Nelson’s album Do Not Lament.

Sydney’s commitment to share early music with the world has taken her across four continents including tours in Puerto Rico, Peru, Colombia, Italy, Austria, Germany, Czechia, Norway, Finland, Denmark, Sweden, Taiwan, and New Zealand with prominent early music figures and ensembles. Additionally, she is a passionate teacher of early music. She was previously an adjunct faculty member at UNT where she taught baroque cello, viola da gamba, historical ornamentation, and early chamber music. You can find her teaching at the Texas Toot in the fall and summer.

Sydney completed her bachelor’s degree at the University of North Texas, a year of studies at The Royal Conservatory of The Hague, and received a master’s degree from The Juilliard School, where she studied with Phoebe Carrai and Sarah Cunningham. During her years at The Juilliard School she was the winner of Juilliard’s inaugural baroque cello concerto competition, making her New York solo debut with Juilliard415 at Alice Tully Hall in New York.

In her free time, Sydney enjoys baking and sitting on the couch with her cats.

Who We Are

WhoWeAre

The Texas Toot is a Texas-based non-profit devoted to early music education and performance, presenting two workshops each year. The Fall Texas Toot is a short weekend workshop with instruction in recorders, viols, early reeds, harp, lute, voice, and more. The Summer Texas Toot offers a one-week program of classes at all levels, focusing on Renaissance and Baroque music, but with offerings for Medieval and 21st century enthusiasts as well. Expert instructors in recorder, viol, early reeds, lute, harp, and voice will tend to young professionals, seasoned amateurs, and eager beginners with equal care.

Author name: Texas Toot