Anne Smith
Blockflöte (Allgemeine Schule SCB)
Renaissance-Traverso-Ensemble (Hochschule SCB)
Anne Smith, who grew up in California, completed her B.A. with honors in music at Brandeis University in 1973. Following this she came to Basel to study recorder and later transverse flute with Hans Martin Linde at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis. She received her concert diploma in recorder from the SCB in 1977. Since 1979 she has been teaching recorder and renaissance flute there herself. The work she did with Barthold Kuijken in workshops and occasional private lessons was also of great influence on her musical development. Throughout the years she has played regularly with small chamber ensembles. In recent years her course offerings at the Schola have included 16th-century music theory in relation to performance practice, solmization, and Alexander Technique. In addition, she has given workshops on these subjects for the early music departments of the conservatories of Brussels, The Hague, and Linz. In December, 2008, she was asked to join the editorial board of Musica Disciplina.
The renaissance flute was the subject of her thesis and the instrument and its music has continued to be of interest to her throughout the years. This is reflected in the various publications about the flute, about questions of 16th century performance practice in relation to pitch, mode and transposition, and about works by Willaert. In 2002 she organized the Renaissance Flute Days together with Liane Ehlich, a symposium about the instrument which brought together a large number of its devotees, performers, musicologists, and makers. There, for the first time, there was a forum to hear and share one another’s experiences with the instrument. Her current focus is on bridging the gap between knowledge of the writing of 16th century musical theorists and its application in performance. To this end she has presented papers in Utrecht in 2003 ( Symposium on Renaissance Recorder and Consorts) and in 2009 (Medieval Renaissance Conference), and in Vienna in 2007 (Medieval Renaissance Conference 2007) in which her musicological research was illustrated with live music.
In 1992 she began her training as an Alexander Teacher with Donald Weed and has been teaching it since 1997. In 1992 she also began to paint and has had various exhibitions of her paintings. Some of them may be seen on her website.
Contact:
Anne Smith
anne[at]smiths.ch
