Online Residency 2022
Resume and Artistic Statement
Bassoonist, Educator, Activist, Scholar
Dr. Midori Samson サムソンみどり (she/her) is a bassoonist, sound artist, educator, and activist in the USA. She is the Instructional Assistant Professor of Bassoon at Illinois State University and performs with the Wisconsin Chamber Orchestra. Her recent creative activities include collaborations with Yo-Yo Ma and Youth Music Culture Guangdong (China), Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy of Music, Artists Striving to End Poverty (India, New York), Boston Festival Orchestra and Horizons for Homeless Children, Goodman Community Center and LunART Inc. (Wisconsin), Payne County Youth Shelter (Oklahoma), and Civic Orchestra of Chicago. She was an artist in residence with the Mashirika Theater Company (Rwanda) where she helped devise a play to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the Rwandan Genocide, and she most recently toured the Turkey-Syria border with the Flying Carpet Festival, a multi-disciplinary circus that performs for refugee children and families. Midori holds degrees in music from The Juilliard School, University of Texas at Austin, and University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she studied both bassoon and social work. Her dissertation discusses how musicians can operationalize social work theory as anti-racist and anti-oppressive action. She brings this philosophy to all of her creative activities, particularly in her role as Artistic Director of Trade Winds Ensemble, a group of teaching artists that host community engagement residencies with social impact organizations in Nairobi, Chicago, and Detroit. MidoriSamson.com
Broadly, my practices as a performer and teaching artist exist at the intersection of music and social work. Having studied both disciplines during my doctorate, I strive for my creative activities to draw from social work’s principles of social justice, community organizing, advocacy, and anti-racism. My electroacoustic compositions engage in the intersection of music and social work as well: I use acoustic bassoon, field recordings, white noise, and electronic distortion to explore themes of identity, relationships, trauma, and resilience. Having trained as an orchestral bassoonist, my works also draw from my experience in classical structures and harmonies. Personally, I am a mixed-race Asian woman, bisexual person, and abuse survivor, and my intersecting identities are inseparable from my musicianship and everything I create.
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