Music
Amy Hillis
Assistant Professor
Assistant Professor (Helen Carswell Chair of Community-Engaged Research in the Arts)
E ahillis@yorku.ca
W Personal Website
EDUCATION
BMus (McGill University), MMus (San Francisco Conservatory of Music), DMus (McGill University)BIOGRAPHY
As a performer and educator, Amy pursues projects which build relationships inside and outside the concert hall. She is the founding member and manager of the prairie-based Horizon String Quartet with whom she has presented seven concert tours of interactive performances for schools across western Canada. At McGill University, Amy established a course titled “Chamber Music and Engaging New Audiences” for the purpose of developing undergraduates’ communication skills within a performance context.
Amy has commissioned and premiered new Canadian works for violin by Jocelyn Morlock, Nicole Lizée, Carmen Braden, Randolph Peters and Jordan Pal. Her debut album titled Roots demonstrates the connections between select Canadian compositions and works from the traditional canon of classical repertoire. As part of the meagan&amy duo, Amy performed this repertoire in ten Canadian provinces during the inaugural “Pan-Canadian Partnership” Recital Tour. She also toured Canada as winner of the Eckhardt-Gramatté National Music Competition and she studied ties between French and Québécois repertoire as artist-in-residence at La Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris.
Amy’s current research as a community music practitioner investigates the importance of a community’s “identity”. How can community musicians facilitate transformative music experiences by deepening a community’s sense of identity, whether this identity is geographical, racial, cultural or gender-based? Amy presents and promotes music by underrepresented composers, particularly in the classical music genre, in order to empower the voices of marginalized communities. Learn more about her research here.
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