KARLIN GREENSTREET LOVE

Born: Anacortes, Washington State, U.S.A. 1956

Karlin has a B.A. (Social Work) from Seattle Pacific University (USA), a B.Mus. in clarinet performance from the University of Washington where she studied composition with William O. Smith and Kenneth Benshoof, and an M.A.(hons) through the University of Wollongong working with Houston Dunleavy and Wayne Dixon.

In 1989 Karlin moved to Australia as woodwind lecturer at the University of Tasmania in Launceston to teach clarinet, saxophone, theory and improvisation until 1997.

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Karlin is now primarily a free-lance performer, composer and teacher, including teaching composition and music technology for the University's Faculty of Education. Performance opportunities taken are varied: guitar, clarinet and saxophone; jazz, classical, 'new music',klezmer, and folk.
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Karlin's current composition interests include writing music for guitar, winds, and the instruments of leather sculptor, the late Garry Greenwood. She is very interested in acoustic timbres and relationships, preferring to get weird sounds from conventional instruments rather than working with electronics. She is not opposed to electronic music and does dabble there, but finds making real people create unusual sounds in real time more fun. She is fascinated by audience-space-performer relationships and has been known to perform in art galleries, seedy pubs, woolsheds, wooded ravines, aircraft hangars, caves and on barges.
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Founder of the Chordwainers leather instrument ensemble, Karlin works with the Tasmanian Leather Orchestra project of the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery in Launceston. She plays Bowhorns, the Black Rose, Pocopods, Mountain Harp and String Drums. Karlin's work with Garry Greenwood began with a performance for a 1994 exhibition. Following that performance, Garry built the first of the bowhorns which use saxophone mouthpieces. She premiered the new instrument within a recital of Australian clarinet music in the U.S.A. later that year.
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She has also composed for the instruments, most notably the Leather Concertino, premiered in Melbourne by the University of Tasmania Wind Orchestra and the Chordwainers; and music for the play Jocasta, by Stella Kent. Karlin's articles on the leather instruments have been published in the Australian Clarinet and Saxophone Journal and Sounds Australian.
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Two commission highlights are a Dombrovskis Wilderness residency at Eddystone Point in northeast Tasmania and a residency at Cataract Gorge, Launceston. Both are fantastic natural settings for reflecting upon the truly important things in life and letting those reflections find their way into music. She is very interested in a Christian spirituality of peace and justice which influences her composition, partly by making ensemble relationships more democratic and creative.
 
What to listen to first? Karlin recommends On Power: concerto for electric guitar and wind ensemble, Blackwater for alto flute and guitar, Emerald Boa for clarinet quartet. Then check out Marakoopa, Geology and Funkopod by the Chordwainers.