Joanna Marsden

‘Baroque flute master’ Joanna Marsden (the Classical Music Sentinel) is a ‘fabulous’ (the Whole Note) flautist based in Montréal, Québec. She has performed with numerous ensembles throughout North America and Europe “beautifully” (Luis Gago, Madrid) and “with notable rhetorical clarity” (Boston Musical Intelligencer). She has worked with conductors including Ton Koopman, Masaaki Suzuki, Reinhard Goebel, Václav Luks, Julian Prégardien, Florian Heyerick, Eric Milnes, Mathieu Lussier, and Peter van Heyghen among others. She collaborates frequently with historical keyboardists Christophe Gauthier and Katelyn Clark.

She is a founding member of Montréal’s Poiesis and Symphonie Atlantique, a conductorless chamber orchestra based in the Netherlands dedicated to Classical and Romantic repertoire led from the violin by Rebecca Huber.

Her début CD, Devienne Sonatas with Mark Edwards, was issued by Centaur Records in February 2019 and has been warmly reviewed by Early Music America and the American Record Guide. Her recording of Michel de la Barre’s Premier livre de pièces (1702) with the Opus Project was released on June 24, 2022 by Navona Records; it was favourably reviewed by the Classical Music Sentinel. She recently recorded an album of Montéclair’s Concerts for baroque flute and basse chiffré with the Opus Project which will be released in 2023. She addresses a wide repertoire, playing antique flutes by Tortochot (Paris, ~1770), Claire Godfroy l’aîné (Paris, ~1820), Jean-Louis Tulou (Paris, ~1841), Louis Esprit Lot (Paris, 1868) and Isidore Lot (Paris ~1870) and faithful reproductions.

She holds degrees from Vassar College, the Royal Conservatory of the Hague and McGill University’s Schulich School of Music. Her main teachers include Wilbert Hazelzet (Royal Conservatory of the Hague), Claire Guimond (Schulich School of Music of McGill University), and John Solum (Vassar College).

Her doctoral research traced the career of the magnificent flautist Jean-Louis Tulou through original instruments dating from 1770-1870. The close connection with antique instruments inspired a broad reading of Tulou’s Méthode de flûte and singing treatises written by his close contemporaries which illuminates how close the practices of vocal ornamentation and melodic improvisation still were in mid-nineteenth-century France. Her Master’s research at the Royal Conservatory of the Hague, supervised by Dr. Jed Wentz, centred around the embodied experience of key characteristics as expressed in the Berlin sonatas of Johann Joachim Quantz through the lens of his instrument-building choices. Other research interests include Renaissance flute consort and mixed consort practices, seventeenth-century French vocal and instrumental improvisation, and new music for old instruments. She has presented on quantitative and qualitative methodologies in artistic research, Louise Farrenc and the Urtext concept, organology, and diverse topics at international conferences.

She has offered engaging workshops and masterclasses on baroque flute and historical performing practices to a wide network of students throughout Europe, North America and South America. She recently presented a workshop on historical performing practice while she was an artist-in-residence at the prestigious Festival de Música de Cámara de San Miguel de Allende. She is an active member of the National Flute Association’s Historical Flutes Committee.

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