ARS Grant Recipient Reports On Her Sitka Experience

Sitka Recorder Residency Report – American Recorder Society Professional Development Grant
by Alana Blackburn

I was honored to be accepted as the 2025 Recorder Resident at the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology. For three weeks I stepped away from university duties to immerse myself in focused recorder practice and explore new creative work. This residency was generously supported by the American Recorder Society’s Professional Development grant, for which I am deeply grateful.

The trip itself was an adventure, a 14-hour flight from summer in Sydney to Los Angeles, then a late-night domestic flight into snowy Portland. After a couple of days to acclimatize, I headed to the coast, where the Sitka team welcomed me to Cascade Head. The towering Sitka spruce, ocean views, and the quiet of the Salmon River estuary, where the forest meets the sea, were breathtaking.

I set two goals for this residency: to revisit early repertoire and technique (especially renaissance diminutions) and to develop a new work informed by Sitka’s environment.

Most days allowed uninterrupted time with my recorders. Mornings were devoted to fundamentals: long-tone work for breath control and tone, articulation studies, finger control and coordination, and intonation. I worked from Staep’s daily exercises, using them as springboards for improvisation and phrasing. Repertoire study centered on Bassano’s Ricercate and historical diminution practice, supported by reading and sketching from Ganassi’s Fontegara and related treatises. I find these pieces tick all the technical boxes: articulation, fingering, phrasing, and breathing. Afternoons shifted to excursions outside my little cabin, for some fresh air, explore the wilderness and to collect field recordings to inspire new creative work.

My recent projects blend site-specific field recordings with recorder performance, exploring the intersections of sound, nature, and storytelling. Arriving in late winter and moving into early spring, I experienced drizzly cold and clear blue days, as well as a severe storm. I walked the ranch tracks and estuary, recording rain, streams, birds, and ocean surf; further up the coast I filmed waves hammering rock shelves and driftwood-strewn beaches after the storm. I was amazed by how many different shades of green algae, lichens and mosses were on and hanging off the trees, creating interesting textures and features. These textures seeded a series of research inquiries: experimenting with layered field recordings shaped into rhythmic and spectral beds, over which I tested recorder lines - sometimes consonant and lyrical, sometimes percussive and breath-led, to “lean into” the different movements of the environment.

The constant movement of the waves against the rocks and shore resulted in early experiments pairing daily technical patterns with wave footage evolved into draft audiovisual sketches: https://youtu.be/v-Dt4OnYWHM

Sitka’s community enriched my experience. I overlapped with a departing cohort and welcomed a new one mid-stay, meeting a sound designer, visual artists, and a dancer. Artist Lauren Ohlgren, in residence throughout, joined me exploring the coast and canoeing the estuary where we were greeted by playful seals on the sunniest day of my stay. Sitka staff shared an ecological tour of the property; later, elk visited my cabin and a local squirrel took up post on the office steps. These were all very different experiences to the kangaroos, cockatoos and eucalyptus I’m used to at home.

This residency gave me rare, protected time to connect with my instruments, rebuild solid technical foundations, and let the environment shape new sonic ideas. The combination of rigorous daily practice and deep listening to place, weather, water, and wood has seeded a new body of work I’ll continue to develop from these Sitka recordings and research. It’s an experience I’ll carry forward, both in performance and in the creation of site-responsive music. I highly recommend this opportunity to recorder players world-wide.

To finish off my trip to the US, a student who I have been teaching online for about 10 years came to visit me in Sitka and took me back to Portland. We’ve only met each other in person twice before, once in Singapore and another in Australia. The global connectivity of the recorder is wonderful!

Part of our commitment to Sitka is to present our experience to the greater community. Here is a copy of my online presentation about my process and work-in-progress (recording, 38’34”): https://youtu.be/Iv1b7rAARA0?si=COCG-RhTSvR44oII&t=2314
 


Dr. Alana Blackburn is a recorder player from New South Wales, Australia. She is a Senior Lecturer in music at the University of New England (Armidale), where she teaches performance, ensemble studies and studio pedagogy. Alana is a graduate from the Sydney and Amsterdam Conservatories and has played in several ensembles internationally, including the Royal Wind Music, New Dutch Academy, Pinchgut Opera, and Salut! Baroque. Alana pushes the confines of traditional recorder playing, bringing together early historical performance practice and contemporary performance delivery through solo performances, collaborating with other artists, commissioning new works, interdisciplinary performance and electro-acoustic presentations.