Musician Emilyn Inglis has been a performer and teacher for much of her life, but this September she took it to a new level and made teaching music in Lyons a business. Inglis is a gifted musician who plays seven instruments and offers lessons in voice, piano and guitar. Her love of music comes naturally and she gives credit to teachers and her family.
Inglis spent the first part of her life in Philadelphia, surrounded by a family that loved music. Classical and folk music were ever present with a father who played numerous instruments and a mother who was a singer and guitar player. Inglis fondly remembers family and friends together with everyone singing or playing an instrument.
Inglis began formal musical training when she was seven and eventually worked her way to the prestigious Oberlin Music Conservatory, in Ohio.
Inglis refers to an Ansel Adams quote, “I believe the approach of the artist and the environmentalist are fairly close in that both are, to a rather impressive degree, concerned with the affirmation of life.” Inglis adds “teacher” to this list, and thus she falls into all three categories.
Her passion for music is intertwined with a goal for seeing the world a better place. Teaching is one way she contributes to this goal. Inglis believes that when someone learns to play music (instruments or voice) it allows them to develop creativity, expression and ultimately confidence. It is Inglis’ hope that given a musical skill and confidence, a student can than go out and touch the lives of others in a positive way.
As a teacher, Inglis feels strongly about making the learning process a positive one. “One adult student told me her choir teacher told her to ‘just mouth the words, rather than sing,’ and she has carried that with her into adulthood.”
Inglis is very happy with the response she’s gotten to teaching music here in Lyons. In the short time she has been open, she has acquired more than 20 students. Students range in age and ability and some of them drive from as far away as Estes Park and Boulder to study with Inglis.
In addition to teaching music, Inglis is a student of music who continues to challenge herself. She is a member of Ars Nova Singers, an a cappella group singing music from the Renaissance and contemporary composers. The 40 members of Ars Nova come from around the front range. Some are composers and others are music teachers, but all are gifted singers who must audition for a spot in the choir.
With her voice as an instrument, Inglis enjoys the challenges of performing folk music and also Baroque or Renaissance. The body must create sound in different ways for different types of music. Ars Nova gives Inglis the skill to perform with diversity. Inglis, along with three other Ars Nova members, will perform Saturday, Nov. 10 at the Lyons United Methodist Church. “Voices of the Golden Age, Love, Drinking, Singing and Sex: Pleasure of the Seventeenth Century.” The music of Claudio Monteverdi and Henry Purcell will be featured along with unpublished drinking songs from the Baroque. For more information on this event, visit www.backbeatconcerts.com.
For more information on Inglis’ performance schedule or voice, guitar or piano lessons visit www.emilynsmusic.com.
BOULDER — The Ars Nova Singers' annual Christmas concerts have become a not-to-miss tradition among audiences seeking unusual, little-heard holiday music far from the overplayed tunes on television commercials and mall soundtracks.
Each season, the ensemble's artistic director, Thomas Edward Morgan, assembles a fresh, fascinating yule program that transports listeners around the world and centuries back in time.
This year, he has done himself proud again, with a diverse, appealing lineup beginning with medieval and Renaissance selections and ending in the musical present.
As usual, Thursday evening's concert, in the fetching setting of St. John's Episcopal Church, managed to be at once exotic and mysterious, moving and festive.
It opened with the evening's most obscure selections, some of the earliest English carols. Highlights included an intimate, transparent trio version of Walter Frye's 15th-century "Ave Regina Caelorum" and a lovely small-ensemble take on Robert Parsons' "Ave Maria."
Closer to our time were a trio of 20th-century Slavic works, arguably the heart of the concert. Here, all the qualities long associated with Ars Nova could be heard to rich advantage — flawless intonation, exacting precision and nuanced dynamics.
The set opened with Pavel Chesnokov's "Salvation Is Created," with the 36-voice choir's sublimely hushed realization of the lingering conclusion. It ended with Krzysztof Penderecki's "Song of Cherubim," a haunting, ultra-complex 1986 work that sounded strangely medieval, bringing the first half full circle.
"Byla Cesta," a folk-flavored Moravian carol, began the second half, with three fine soloists — sopranos Shannon Johnson and Karen Ramirez and countertenor Robert Sussuma — backed by an all-female ensemble.
Next came an unexpected pairing of surprisingly well-matched antiphons by two contemporary composers from opposite sides of the world, one world-famous, the other known locally — Arvo Pärt of Estonia and R. Anthony Lee of Boulder.
The evening ended suitably on a lighter note, with Morgan's handsome new arrangement of "O Little Town of Bethlehem," featuring stunning solo work by soprano Tana Cochran, and two other favorites as encores.
There are two more opportunities to hear this program this weekend. Tickets are still available, but be aware that these concerts typically sell out.
"InnerLight: Christmas With Ars Nova"
An unconventional holiday program by the 36-voice a cappella ensemble. 7:30 p.m. today, St. Elizabeth's Church, Auraria campus; 2:30 p.m. Sunday, St. John's Episcopal Church, 1419 Pine St., Boulder. $20, $16 seniors and $12 students. 303-499-3165 or arsnovasingers.org. 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Stanley Hotel, Estes Park. Donations will be accepted. Proceeds benefit the Estes Park Performing Arts Center. 970-481-6142 or estesparktheater.com.
THOSE WERE THE DAYS--LYONS FOLK PRIESTESS OFFERS MUSICAL TONIC FOR POST-MILLENNIAL MALAISE
So I met the Lyons-based folk chanteuse Emilyn at the Outlaw bar (in Lyons), where she modestly walked in one winter night clutching her guitar case.
It was Wednesday open-mike night, where patrons gathered for bright lights, cold beer and the stellar honky-tonk music served up by the Robyn Pollard and the Redstone Racket Club house band.
Her timing was right, as after applauding the regular male pickers and singers doing their best Merle Haggard and Charley Pride covers, I was ready for the sultry sweet-talking of a female voice.
In my beer-induced haze, I summoned images of a 27-year-old Emilyn as a younger Emmylou Harris in a smoke-filled Washington D.C. bar in 1971, the night Harris was discovered by country trailblazer Gram Parsons.
After chatting with Emilyn later that night, she handed me a just-released CD entitled “Some Lone Valley,” and I promised I’d write her a review.
That was a year ago, and while I’m a little late, I must say that it’s taken me this long to digest her album, which unexpectedly expanded what I thought was my already wide musical attention span.
First off, I was wrong to peg Emilyn as a country singer in the mold of Loretta Lynn, because she radiates more in the spiritual etherealness of 1960s artists like the British Mary Hopkins and Donovan and the American Joan Baez.
Emilyn especially reminds me of Hopkins, who was one of the first artists signed to The Beatles' Apple Records in 1969, where she recorded the classic album “Post Card,” containing the international hit “Those Were the Days.”
Like Hopkins, who commanded any attentive soul’s attention with child-like musings about life’s canonical meanings, Emilyn songs, most of which pre-date the 20th century, take the listener back to simpler times, with songs bred of natural beauty and archetypal human desires.
With Emilyn’s soaring soprano and masterful phrasing, one envisions a more pure and serene society - one less complacent with unimportant matters and plagued by the emptiness of cell phones, NASCAR, suburban sprawl, Internet pornography and fast food.
Emilyn’s Nordic ballads and Appalachian song poems are the perfect potion for tuning out modern society’s ills.
Her re-interpreted tunes about communal longings and agrarian concerns might become more relevant, as an end to cheap oil and global warming force modern societies to become more localized (see “The Long Emergency” by James Kunstler). In a future of environmental and economic disaster-based entropy, it’s not hard to foresee the acoustic guitar and flute sounds on “Some Lone Valley” outliving the Stratocaster-based garage bands of today.
From universal topics of boy versus girl struggles in, “Johnny be fair,” to Civil War era ballads on lost love in the haunting, “Maggie,” Emilyn has the gift of timeless transcendence.
Emilyn plays virtually all the instruments on all the songs, which venture from a Scottish ballad warning of an adulterous couple's descent into hell, to an ode to the majestic Colorado mountains. Emilyn’s great-grandmother penned the latter track, “Autumn in the Rockies,” on her first visit to Allenspark in the late 1930s, capturing the beauty and isolation of mountain life.
Emilyn’s music might be hard to package to the myspace generation - it’s not the latest alt-country with revved-up indy rock inflections (ala Neko Case) - but it will instill wonder in those looking for something deeper.
Just as Paul McCartney discovered the young Mary Hopkins amidst the British folk club scene in 1969, hopefully some knight (or noble) will discover Emilyn, enabling her to be heard by more ears yearning for timeless beauty in music.