Day 30 | Recorder31

We chatted to Sarah Jeffery about everything recorder including her recorder journey, her projects, Team Recorder, YouTube and much more! 

Visit Sarah's website for information on Sarah, her upcoming projects, courses and more. Why not subscribe to her YouTube channel and follow her on Twitter!

About Sarah Jeffery

Audiences recognise Jeffery as the only recorder player invited to Splendor, the award-winning Amsterdam-based music collective, as of 2019. She has gained significant notoriety over the years, with a full suite of past performances that include the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, the Gaudeamus Festival NL, Sonorities festival Belfast, and NEU/NOW festival Glasgow.

Recent career highlights include a guest star appearance on BBC children;'s programme 'YolanDa's Band Jam', recent travels to Singapore to act as musical director for the film 'Recorder Rewrite', as well as Jeffery's debut album, Constellations (2018), for which Jeffery attained rare permission to arrange and perform Steve Reich's "Vermont Counterpoint". This season she has performed in venues as far flung as London and Helsinki, Sao Paulo and Singapore.

In addition to her solo career, Jeffery performs regularly with a number of her own projects, ranging from experimental pop band Jerboah, to recorder trio axolotl, to Renaissance recorder consort The Royal Wind Music, and much more. Other notable ensembles Sarah has worked with include the Nieuw Ensemble, Het Zuidelijk Toneel, s t a r g a z e orchestra, Psallentes choir, Amsterdam Cello Octet, Jeugdtheater Sonnevanck, PRIME recorder ensemble, the Veenfabriek, Atlas Ensemble, and the White Noise Orchestra.

In an effort to maximise her reach, Jeffery has cultivated an educational presence both on and offline. Online, she posts weekly instructional tutorials on technique, improvisation, repertoire, and much more on her YouTube channel, Team Recorder. One of the most recognisable resources for recorder, the channel has amassed over 150,000 loyal subscribers. Outside YouTube, Jeffery not only has teaching experience from age five to professional level, but also conducts improvisation and composition workshops in the SoundLAB of the Muziekgebouw can't IJ. She has taught more specialised recorder courses across Europe and Brazil, including at the Birmingham Conservatoire, Dartington Summer School, FolkWorld Summer School, and Rijksuniversiteit Groningen.

Outside pedagogy, Jeffery co-ordinates the biannual ORDA Teachers Conference in Amsterdam, and can be found giving lectures at a range of educational conferences, including MERYC and the Utrecht Early Music Festival. She also has written for music publications such as Tempo, Primephonic, and Blokfluitist magazine, where she is part of the editorial team. 

Originally from Derbyshire in the UK, Sarah Jeffery is currently based in Amsterdam. She holds both a Master of Music cum laude and Bachelor of Music diploma from the Conservatorium van Amsterdam, where she completed a thesis on the relationship between clog dancing and contemporary music theatre, and also holds a first class Bachelor of Music degree from the Birmingham Conservatoire. She is grateful to her masterful pedagogues, who include Jorge Issac, Walter van Hauwe and Annabel Knight.

Biography: @John_Hong