Bio
Sara Constant is a flutist from Toronto, Canada, working with a special interest in contemporary music. Sara’s performance practice and research focus on contemporary chamber music, experimental theatre, Asian American identity, and ecology.
Active as a soloist, improviser and ensemble musician, she has performed recently as a soloist with the Silverthorn Symphonic Winds, and as a flute/voice duo with soprano Rebecca Gray, where collaboration with composers and visual artists is a core part of their work. Sara also collaborates regularly with guitarist An-Laurence Higgins, most recently on Émergences (f. pl.), a commissioning project working with early-career women composers in Toronto and Montreal. Sara completed her Bachelor’s degree in music at the University of Toronto (where she studied flute with Camille Watts), followed by an MA in musicology at the Universiteit van Amsterdam specializing in 20th- and 21st-century classical music. She has since participated in new music workshops and festivals in Austria (Impuls Academy), the United States (Oh My Ears), and Canada (Toronto Creative Music Lab; Waterloo Region Contemporary Music Sessions), and is currently a co-organizer of the Toronto Creative Music Lab (TCML)—a peer-mentored summer new music workshop for early-career performers, composers, and ensembles.
Since fall 2018, Sara has also been working as a participant in the 2018-2020 CoPeCo program—a joint program for contemporary performance and composition, co-hosted by the Estonian Academy for Music and Theater, the Royal College of Music Stockholm, the Conservatoire de Lyon, and the Hochschule for Music and Theatre Hamburg. Through CoPeCo, Sara has been developing work with an international team of other early-career musicians in residencies at each host institution, working with a focus on experimental performance, electronics, improvisation, and interdisciplinary practice.
Sara is currently based in Toronto, where she works as a freelance flutist, music writer, and arts administrator. Her other current projects in Toronto include working as a writer and editor at The WholeNote magazine, and as the 2018/19 curator for Emergents, a 4-concert series at the Music Gallery dedicated to showcasing local early-career artists working in experimental music.