Tessa Brinckman

Interdisciplinary flutist/composer Tessa Brinckman has been praised for her “chameleon-like gifts” and “virtuoso elegance” (Gramophone), an “excellent…flutist” (Willamette Week) and “highlight of Portland” (New Music Box), who “play(s) her instrument with great beauty and eloquence” (Music Matters New Zealand). Originally from New Zealand, she has premiered well over a hundred new works (commissioning almost thirty), with many acclaimed classical music ensembles, concert series, musicians and composers across the globe. Now based in New York City since 2022, she enjoys creating and performing unique work that honors synesthesia, dialect, innate meter and collaboration, often on geo-political themes in a surrealist spirit.

She performs internationally as an orchestral, chamber, soloist and resident artist, in numerous and wildly diverse productions, from the Oregon Symphony, the Atlantic Center for the Arts (FL), Waikato and Canterbury Universities (New Zealand), Festival of New American Music (CA), CCRMA (Stanford, CA), Hermanus Whale Festival (South Africa), Goodman Theater (Chicago), Britt Festival Orchestra (OR), Wuzhen Theatre Festival (China), to Poisson Rouge and Roulette (New York City).

Playing flute, piccolo, alto, bass, contrabass and baroque flutes, and miscellaneous keyboards, she also co-directs the ever-polymathic bi-coastal duo, Caballito Negro, with percussionist Terry Longshore, commissioning significant new work for flute and percussion. Her composition team for Tony Award-winning director Mary Zimmerman’s White Snake was nominated for a Joseph Jefferson Award (2014). Her experimental video (with Jane Rigler), Women in Parallel Empires (2021), exploring the moon, extraction, and “Empire”, and the animation The Gorgon Cycles (2023) (created with Miles Inada and Devyn McConachie) depicting Medusa’s rise in the Anthropocene, have won 22 film festival awards for music scoring, animation and experimental film. She has served on the music faculties of colleges such as Southern Oregon University, and teaches international workshops and masterclasses that address flute culture, music-making and artist activism.

Tessa’s current projects include her critically acclaimed album release, Take Wing, Roll Back (New Focus Recordings), that embodies her personal and artistic connections to New Zealand, USA, South Africa and France; releasing several of her scores for various flutes and mixed media; guest artist collaborations in NYC (including concerts at Le Poisson Rouge and Roulette) and other new music concerts across the US; with recent support from Bethany Arts Community Interdisciplinary Residency, New York Women Composers Seed Money Grant, Manhattan Arts Grant and Chamber Music America (funded through the generosity of The Howard Gilman Foundation).

www.tessabrinckman.com