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Name
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Kari Cruver Medina
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Bio
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Seattle-based composer and pianist, Kari Cruver Medina, has worked as a composer, music director, studio musician, and Emmy-nominated composer for film and television. Her award winning music includes compositions spanning a broad swath of stylistic traditions, including art song, solo and chamber works as well as choral, band, and orchestral compositions. Medina’s music has been performed and premiered across the country and internationally.
2025 premieres include: Herstories: Ruth Bader Ginsberg for Bassoon Quartet, Meg Quigley Symposium, North Carolina (Jan). Wind between the Worlds; Fresh Airs from the Northern Isles for solo flute, Mid-Atlantic Flute Convention, Washington DC (Feb.) Portland, OR (April). There and Back for wind trio, Oregon, Washinton, (Feb.) BIRDS I VIEW for oboe, bassoon and piano, SHE Festival, Arkansas (Mar.) Prairie Spring, for Reed Quartet, and Les Saisons - Four Movements a la Mucha for Reed Trio (Oboe, Clarinet, Bassoon) and Strings, International Double Reed Society (IDRS) Indianapolis, Indiana (June), and ClarinetFest, Fort Worth, Texas (July)
2024 performances and awards include the world premiere of Wanderings for woodwind quintet, premiered by the Wild Prairie Winds in September. Selkies for Flute Choir, won The National Flute Association’s call for scores and had its world premiere at the NFA Convention in San Antonio in August. Viriditas; The Greening was commissioned by the Northwest Symphony Orchestra and performed in March. The whimsical Dog Diaries for woodwind trio, a finalist in the American Prize, was also the chamber music winner of University of Florida’s international “Call for Scores by Women Composers” and performed by the UF’s New Music Ensemble. Sasquatch; Sightings for Bassoon Quartet and commissioned by the Ladies Bassoon Band, premiered in March at the SHE: festival of Women in Music. Both of these pieces were included in a concert featuring Medina’s Chamber music at the International Double Reed Society (IDRS) Conference in July. The Land of No More Night for Women’s SSAA Chorus, was selected as one of the winners of Corra Sound’s call for scores (premiere in the England TBA 2024). The Cabinet of Curiosities for flute duo, just won the 2024 Flute New Music Consortiums’s Flute Chamber Music Composition contest.
2023 premieres included Dog Diaries Taneycomo Festival Orchestra: Music by Living Composers, Cabinet of Curiosities for flute duo, (Oct. 2023) and Shorebirds for chamber orchestra, performed by the Orlando Contemporary Chamber Orchestra (Fall 2023). Additional Chamber music premieres 2021-2023 include The Marvelous Madame Yucca, from the “In the Company of Strong Women” series, written for the Peregrine Rose Woodwind Trio, Vignettes, for Bassoon and String Quartet, Forest and Fenn, for woodwind quintet, performed by the Alliance Classical Players, Anam Cara, for Wind Quartet and piano, and Saranam, for Strings and small ensemble.
Making A Way (for wind orchestra) received an honorable mention in the 2023 American Prize Competition. Vignettes for Bassoon and String Quartet, was a finalist. Three of Medina's previous orchestral compositions placed in the 2022 American Prize Competition: Nisse Mischief (second place), Völuspá; Song of the Seeress (finalist), and VIVA (finalist). In addition, her 2021 choral piece The Tale of a Train: The City of Truro, was awarded First Prize in the world’s largest male choral festival, Cornwall International Male Choir Festival Composition Contest, an award she also won in 2018 and 2020, with a first place for Winter Has Come and third place for The Tyger. (The remarkably serendipitous story behind the composing of “The Tail of a Train” can be found here: “The Tale of the Tale of the Train!”
Medina's solo piano composition Web and Wings, received the 2021 Renée B. Fisher Composer Commission. Two collections of her art songs for soprano and piano, My Heart a Singing Bird and Wider Than the Sky were selected for publication in North Star Music’s “Modern Music for New Singers 21st Century American Art Songs” series. The SSA choral Medatabor, was awarded Honorable Mention in Notre Dame's 2021 Liturgical Composition Competition.
Additional premieres and commissions over the past couple of years have included work for a variety of instrumental ensembles, including the Northwest Symphony Orchestra and Ensemble Belle de la Musique (EBM) One of these pieces, Connemara is featured on EBM’s Love and Beauty (2020) album available on Spotify and iTunes.
Born and raised in the Pacific Northwest, Kari Cruver Medina grew up on the Puget Sound. It was a nature-lover’s dream. Pods of Orca whales frequented the area and the seashore teamed with life. Summer evenings were frequently spent around a bonfire singing folk songs and show tunes, siblings harmonizing while dad played battered guitar. As a child she basked in this loving, creative environment of nature and song, and its glow continues to inspire and inform her writing.
Medina attended the University of Washington in composition and piano performance. There she met her husband, brain scientist and author John Medina. The two attended graduate school together at Washington State University, where Kari completed her Masters degree with Dr. Loran Olsen. Settling in Seattle, she worked for years as the Music Director for a large Presbyterian church, then spent a decade raising two sons who are now in college. It was when the youngest graduated from high school in 2018 that she returned to composing full time.
Nature remains Medina’s playground, and when not composing you will find her working in her garden or tramping through the woods: a rake, a book of poetry, and cup of coffee at hand. She loves to travel and savors the opportunity to share the joy of making music with friends across the globe.
