Once a BU Tanglewood Institute Student, Alum Valerie Coleman Returns as Visiting Artist
This article was originally published in BU Today on July 16, 2019. By Joel Brown.
When Valerie Coleman knocks on the door of her old dorm room at the BU Tanglewood Institute, a sleepy-eyed teenager gets out of bed to answer. “I’m sorry,” Coleman tells her. “I just wanted to see if the stars are still on the ceiling.”
“No, they’re not there,” the mildly puzzled student says.
BUTI alum Coleman (CFA’95) can’t quite remember how long she spent here that summer after high school—could such a life-changing experience have lasted only two weeks?—but she hasn’t forgotten the glow-in-the-dark constellations that a previous occupant had stuck to the ceiling of her room for something to dream on.
In the decades since, Coleman has ascended into the firmament herself, as founder and former flutist of the Imani Winds chamber ensemble, anointed one of the “Top 35 Female Composers in Classical Music” by the Washington Post. Now an assistant professor at the University of Miami Frost School of Music, Coleman was back at BUTI last week as a visiting artist, giving master classes to flutists and composers and performing in a trio with two students in a community engagement concert for about 50 children at the Berkshire South Regional Community Center in Great Barrington, Mass.
“Standing in front of the students yesterday, I started to get flashbacks of me and my friends, and my mind automatically shifted to: what advice can I give them to help them appreciate the experience,” she says. “They will probably not know how powerful and impactful this experience will be for them. Right now they’re living in the moment, but looking back they’re going to recognize it changed their lives.”
On Wednesday, musicians in BUTI’s Young Artists Wind Ensemble program will perform one of Coleman’s best-known works, Umoja: The First Day of Kwanza, in a prelude concert at 6:20 pm before the Boston Landmarks Orchestra’s 2019 season-opening performance at the Hatch Memorial Shell on the Esplanade.