Flutist Viola Chan is a graduate of The Juilliard School’s Bachelor of Music and Master of Music programs, under the tutelage of Carol Wincenc. She is currently a freelance musician based in New York City, as well as a substitute player for the Albany and Princeton Symphony Orchestras. A passionate advocate for new music, Ms. Chan had the opportunity to work with Steve Reich at his 2014 concert in Carnegie’s Zankel Hall, performing “Drumming” with Colin Currie and the Juilliard Percussion Ensemble. This past summer, she was invited as a fellow to the Tanglewood Music Center. In the summer of 2019, Ms. Chan was the principal flutist under Maestro Edward Gardner in The Juilliard School’s tour with the Royal Academy of Music, during which the orchestra performed in Royal Albert Hall of the BBC Proms in London. In previous years, she has participated in the Spoleto Festival USA (2018, 2019), Orpheus@Mannes (2019), Aspen Music Festival and School (2018), National Orchestral Institute+Festival (2015), and New York Symphonic Ensemble (2015).
Ms. Chan also runs two small businesses- Portraits by Viola, photographing headshots and portraits, and Art of Music Engraving, crafting elegant hand-copied engravings of timeless musical scores as well as modern works.
Michael Seyfrit was born in Kansas in 1947 and grew up in Pasco, Washington and Piqua, Ohio. In the course of a multifaceted career, Seyfrit did research and historical orchestrations for the Smithsonian Institution's Divisions of Musical Instruments and Performing Arts, and was Curator of Musical Instruments at the Library of Congress for four years. His writings include Musical Instruments in the Dayton C. Miller Collection at the Library of Congress, Volume I: Recorders, Fifes, and Simple System Transverse Flutes of One Key, and the articles on woodwind instruments in the 1986 edition of The New Harvard Dictionary of Music. As a composer, he received the Charles Ives Scholarship from the National Academy of Arts and Letters.
As an instrumentalist on recorder, baroque oboe and baroque flute, Seyfrit performed and recorded with the Smithsonian Chamber Players and appeared with other ensembles including Hesperus, Wondrous Machine, Berkeley Collegium Musicum, Portland Baroque Orchestra and Early Music Guild of Oregon. His final years were spent on the West Coast, where he worked as a computer programmer. Michael Seyfrit died of AIDS in Portland, Oregon at the age of 46 on May 29, 1994.
— Nurit Tilles
Pages From My Diary - Michael Seyfrit
Recorded at home in New York, NY October 2020
Viola Chan, flute
Mastered by Robert Scott Thompson, Aucourant Records.
Property of Shelter Recording Project, American Composers Alliance.
