Heather Armstrong to give faculty oboe recital Feb. 19

Heather Armstrong, Luther College assistant professor of oboe and music theory, will present a faculty oboe recital Thursday, Feb. 19 at 7 p.m. in the Noble Recital Hall.

Armstrong’s recital “Oboe + 1” includes works for oboe with harpsichord and oboe with flute.

Luther faculty members Kathryn Reed-Maxfield, harpsichord, and Carol Hester, flute, will perform with Armstrong. 

Armstrong will also perform with junior and senior students from her oboe studio in a set of pieces for two oboes.

Armstrong holds the bachelor of music degree from Houghton College, where she studied with Emily Agnew, Rachel Smith and Anna Hendrickson. She holds the master of music and doctor of musical arts degrees from the Eastman School of Music, where she was a student of Richard Killmer.  She has also studied at the Banff Centre for the Arts, the Chautauqua School of Music and the MasterWorks Festival.

Armstrong is a member of the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Symphony and also performs with the La Crosse Symphony. 

Before moving to Iowa she played principal oboe with the Southern Tier Symphony (N.Y.), and has performed with the Erie (Penn.) and Binghamton (N.Y.) Philharmonic Orchestras, Cayuga Chamber Orchestra, Rochester Chamber Orchestra and Equinox Symphony.

In the summer of 2006 Armstrong performed a series of four concerts with the Olean (N.Y.) Chamber Music Society and was featured as faculty soloist in a concert at the Csehy Summer School of Music in Philadelphia, Penn.  She has appeared in solo and chamber music recitals at Alfred University, the Hochstein School of Music and Dance, the Eastman School of Music, Houghton College and Theater-Regensburg, Germany.

Prior to joining the Luther music faculty, Armstrong was assistant professor of oboe and music theory at Houghton College and instructor of oboe at the Hochstein School of Music and Dance in Rochester, N.Y.  She also taught at Roberts Wesleyan College, Eastman Community Music School, the Eastman School of Music and the Csehy Summer School of Music.

In 2006, Armstrong and composer Sun Mi Ro, assistant professor of theory and composition at Houghton College, were awarded a grant from the Hanson Institute of American Music.  The grant makes possible the commissioning of a new work for oboe and percussion by Ro, which premiered at the 2008 International Double Reed Convention in Provo, Utah.

Armstrong will perform this summer at the Cedar Valley Chamber Music Festival in Cedar Falls, Iowa, on a program titled “The Dreams of Isaac and Jacob: A Historical Narrative of Waterloo Jewish History.”