Glenda Bates is an
oboist, vocalist, composer, curator, and multi-disciplinary artist
blending genres, styles, and art-forms into immersive narrative experiences.
A well-rounded performer, Dr. Bates is also an enthusiastic and creative teacher. Bates was a Teaching Artist at Performing Arts Workshop for five years, creating and teaching preschool music curriculum in San Francisco. She has also taught with Music for Aardvarks, Notes Music Academy, Mid Peninsula Music Academy, and Bay Area Children's Theater. She currently teaches for her own company, Glenda Bates Music, teaching private lessons and group classes. She writes music and curriculum for her KinderBlues classes which fuse contemporary and classical music ideas into a fun, engaging, and developmentally appropriate music classes for children and their caregivers. She teaches oboe, piano, ukulele, and jazz voice lessons.
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Dr. Bates was recently the Jazz Ensemble Director at Pacific Union College for two years, and she taught undergraduate oboists at the University of Maryland from 2008-2010. She has also been a university classroom instructor for topics including Music Appreciation, Music After 1900, Rock Music, and Jazz. Her Doctorate of Musical Arts in Oboe Performance is from Stony Brook University.
EDUCATION
Glenda received her Doctorate of Musical Arts in Oboe Performance from Stony Brook University under the guidance of Professor Pedro Diaz, English horn soloist at the Metropolitan Opera. She earned her Master’s in Music from the University of Maryland, and her Bachelor’s degree from the University of South Carolina. Previous oboe teachers include Mark Hill, Rebecca Nagel, Carol Stephenson, and Susan Vought-Findley. She has also studied Baroque performance practice with Marc Schachmann and Arthur Haas, and jazz with Ray Anderson and Bert Ligon.
Glenda is a multi-faceted musician and teacher whose specialties include chamber music, orchestral repertoire, jazz, historical performance, and contemporary classical. She plays modern and Baroque oboes, English horn, ukulele, and is a jazz vocalist. She is an active freelancer in Baroque, Classical, Contemporary, and Jazz ensembles, and frequently collaborates with contemporary composers to perform new works for oboe and English horn. She has performed with California Bach Society, New Opera New York, Festival Opera Oakland, Symphony Napa Valley, Eldad Tarmu, Ray Anderson, Jazz Mafia, Evanescence, and more. She also curated the cross-genre and multidisciplinary -->Crossing Over Series--> at Center for New Music, San Francisco.
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Blending the boundaries between language and music, Glenda writes poetry and song poems. She was an artist in residence at the Artship, a community art space in Playland, a neighborhood park in the Outer Sunset district in San Francisco. Her installation, Poet's Blues, combined poetry, music performance, painting, space making, and community engagement to explore aspects of the blues musically, spiritually, emotionally, and as a whole body, multi sensory experience.