With a unique profile in education, performance, and entrepreneurship, Alissa Freeman is a passionate musician who is always working on a new project.
As a performer, Alissa invites audiences to have new experiences in classical music by incorporating and contextualizing diverse programming. She recently prepared a series entitled Passports: Piano Music from Across the Continents to be presented at elementary schools, senior living centers, and other community centers in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Believing in the importance of contextualizing historical music for audiences, she also recently prepared Clara Schumann and the Evolution of the Piano Recital after researching the topic in Zwickau, Germany.One of Alissa’s greatest goals is to build more inclusive environments by understanding barriers to inclusivity and finding creative ways to remove them.
Her most recent project, ||:HerClassical:|| seeks to promote music written by 18th-century women composers by compiling and producing recordings, editions, and teaching resources. Very few pieces by women composers from this era are included in modern pedagogical compilations, though these pieces are wonderful additions to the student repertoire. By highlighting these pieces and creating new, more accessible editions, ||:HerClassical:|| opens the doors for pianists and teachers to explore this music.
Alissa is a firm believer that music can shape and change communities, each with their own unique needs and solutions.
Residence project:
Through the Odyssée Artist-in-Residency Program, she hopes to use this dedicated space and time to further expand the ||:HerClassical:|| project in three major ways: include French women composers for the first time in the project, work on brand new editions which will be published on herclassical.com at the end of the project and create recordings of as many works as possible, either on modern piano or fortepiano.
It’s a collaboration with Patricia Garcia Gil.