About

Keith and Melody met in 1982 when they were both students at the University of Northern Iowa School of Music in Cedar Falls, Iowa; their first performance together was an Honors Recital performance of the Purcell “Sonata in D” arranged for piccolo trumpet and organ…we think. 40 years is a long time. Keith also turned pages for one of Melody’s degree recitals, nearly causing a complete train wreck in the middle movement of a Bach Trio Sonata. He’s refused to ever turn pages for anyone, ever again. More performances followed, as did a couple of years of dating one another; we somehow managed to extricate ourselves from that without any serious damage and continued to work together occasionally. Melody moved on to the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory for her MM degree and then to USC for her DMA, and Keith went to the Eastman School for his DMA. One of Keith’s DMA recitals while at Eastman involved Melody, and included a new work (at least to us) for trumpet and organ by David Sampson, “The Mysteries Remain,” which opened our eyes to the possibilities of new music for the duo; this was clearly no Purcell “Sonata in D.” We started to search for music with a more forward-looking approach, from that point on.

In the meantime, Melody met her future husband Brad in LA, and Keith met his future wife Jennifer, also in California. Keith and Jennifer’s first date was … no, really, this is true … dinner with Melody and Brad. Keith played for Brad and Mel’s wedding (although, sadly, not very well, which still haunts him). Keith became the trumpet professor at the UMKC Conservatory in 1989, which gave him a place to put down what ended up becoming very deep roots, and to think about long-term plans for Clarion. With help from grants from the University, we recorded our first Compact Disc for Gothic Records in the freezing cold of December 1993, a CD rather unimaginatively titled “New Music for Trumpet and Organ.” This recording also found us navigating the new waters of commissioning a new work, a piece composed for Clarion by our good friend Peter Hamlin which was, much more imaginatively, called Sonata Ben Melodico. We discovered how much fun it was to work on music actually written for us, from a living composer that we could call (or, later on, email) and complain to about how hard their music was to play!

Since then, we’ve commissioned a dozen new works from really incredible composers, recorded two more CD’s (for Gothic Records and Crystal Records) and feel like we have made a real contribution to the literature for the duo. Everything from Klezmer music to electronic music, pieces with references to the Canadian rock band Rush and the poetry of Ralph Waldo Emerson and writings of Huston Smith. The third CD is an emotional tribute to the memory of Keith’s son Cameron, lost to leukemia at the age of seven, with some truly profound works.

We’ve performed from coast to coast in the US, and had a performance tour in Hungary in 2005, and we’re now scheduling a tour in England and Scotland for the summer of 2023.

Through all this, Keith and Mel have maintained a profound friendship (they’ve never had a single argument, even in all those middle of the night recording sessions!) and an abiding desire to perform music that has an emotional connection.