Passion for music, language creates connections for Stephanie Harron '16
By Stephanie Smaglo | November 25, 2014
Stephanie Harron ’16 wants to inspire people with music. She hopes the range of her trumpet will saturate listeners with a feeling—an emotion they can relate to, one that connects. She had the opportunity to do just that Nov. 24 as she played the B flat trumpet, the piccolo trumpet and the flugelhorn as part of her junior solo recital held in Virginia Wesleyan’s Hofheimer Theater.
“There’s something unique about playing as a soloist because people get to hear you,” Harron says. “It’s another level that you experience as a musician. You have an understanding of the intention of the music and essentially what you want to convey as an artist to the audience.”
During the recital, Harron played selections from the baroque, impressionist, romantic and contemporary eras, including David Hickman’s arrangement of Claude Debussy’s “La fille aux cheveux de lin”; G.F. Handel’s “Suite in D Major”; Joseph Turrin’s “Psalm”; Alexander Arutunian’s “Concerto for Trumpet”; and Eugene Bozza’s “Dialogue.” She was accompanied on piano by VWC Professor of Music and Artist-in-Residence Lee Jordan-Anders.
“Stephanie is a remarkably mature young woman whose intense focus and passion for music gets her to campus every morning at 8 a.m. or earlier to practice,” says Jordan-Anders. “She aggressively pursues any opportunity to better her playing…It has been a real treat for me to work with her.”
Harron also puts this passion toward a double major in applied music and Hispanic studies. She was recently inducted into the National Collegiate Hispanic Honor Society, Sigma Delta Pi, and in January she will head to Seville, Spain to study abroad as part of VWC’s Global Scholars Program. She hopes to one day pursue a career in arts management.
“I’d like to understand more of the behind the scenes of the performing arts,” she says. “Whether as an artistic director or a representative of artists. I love to play, but it’s a dog-eat-dog world out there, especially as a musician, so you kind of have to make your ways as an artist.”
The young trumpeter already has a resume filled with experience. She plays at local bars, restaurants and festivals as part of the reggae band Session Rockers; and performs with local ensembles including Symphonic Artistry, Kempsville Presbyterian Church Orchestra and Old Dominion University’s jazz band.
She also volunteers with Sandler Performing Arts Center and Tidewater Arts Outreach, an organization that brings the joy and healing power of the arts to people with special needs.
“The trumpet is essentially my voice, as if a singer were going to sing a note,” she says. “And you would be so surprised at the life that music gives people.”