Introduction
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Sarah Schmalenberger, musicologist and hornist, teaches music history courses for both undergraduate and graduate programs in music. An active professional musician, she also teaches studio French Horn and presents master classes on horn performance in the region.
Dr. Schmalenberger conducts original research on a variety of topics exploring the lives of musicians past and present. Her most current research, the Brass Bodies Study, explores the occupational well-being of female brass players. Her earliest published scholarship documents the thriving network of African-American women in the western European concert music tradition during the early twentieth century. Dr.Schmalenberger has also conducted extensive research on the effects of cancer treatment on women musicians with breast cancer. Her findings are published in the journal Medical Problems of Performing Artists. Additional publications include an essay on selected repertoire of Frank Zappa as well as a chapter on all-female rock bands in the Twin Cities.
As a performing artist, Dr. Schmalenberger collaborates with professional and community peer musicians. Her faculty recitals include solo and chamber works, new compositions and multi-media components. With particular interest in improvisation, she is currently exploring the incorporation of guitar pedals and theremin into original solos for horn. She is co-founder of the popular annual BrassChix ( www.stthomas.edu/brasschix/) forum for female brass musicians, and she has hosted an International Horn Society workshop as well as two Chamber Winds Symposia featuring the Imani Winds. In 2015 she co-founded the Swing Sisterhood Big Band, an all-female jazz ensemble, in which she both directs and plays horn. Prior to living in the Twin Cities, she was a hornist with the Duluth-Superior Symphony, the Lake Superior Chamber Orchestra, the Early Music Orchestra and the Breckenridge (Colorado) Festival Orchestra.
As Dr.Schmalenberger continues her research on female brass musicians, she is also completing a memoir on music and resilience, entitled Soulsinging ( https://www.soulsinging.me/).