B I O G R A P H Y

San Diego, California based Marion Garver is active as a flutist, teacher, composer, broadcaster and writer associated with jazz and classical music. She began playing flute when she was 11 years old in Mesquite, Texas where she grew up. She attended and graduated from Dallas's Booker T Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts (Arts Magnet) in 1986. After graduation, she moved to Edmonton, Alberta, Canada where she studied flute and graduated from the jazz music program at Grant MacEwan Community College in 1991. During this period she was active in the music scene in Edmonton as a host of a 20th Century Classical music program on University of Alberta campus radio CJSR, a writer for an Edmonton monthly entertainment magazine See and played in several jazz, classical and alternative music groups. In 1992, she started working with Shawn Pinchbeck and also moved to Los Angeles, California to study flute and composition at the California Institute of the Arts where she graduated with her Bachelor of Fine Arts Studies in 1995. There she studied contemporary flute performance with Rachel Rudich, composition with Barry Schrader, jazz with Steve Kujala and Paul Novros and Balinese suling with I Nyoman Wenten. After meeting Dutch flutemaker Eva Kingma in 1995, she became interested in her key-on-key system of quartertone flutes, named the 'Kingma-system'. This encouraged Marion to study for her Master's with John Fonville at the University of California, San Diego. She completed her Master of Arts, flute performance in 1999. Inspired by Swiss flutist and contrabass flute specialist Matthias Ziegler, Marion encourage Kingma to extend her lower flute making to Contrabass and contralto flutes. She demonstrates her instruments with Eva at flute conventions in the United States, Europe and for FluteWise events in the United Kingdom. She is also president of San Diego New Music and member-at-large for the San Diego Flute Guild. Marion formerly played with Jethro Tull tribute band "Heavy Horses" and funk band "Flavor 8". Currently, she performs with the San Diego State University flute choir and San Diego based funk/Afro-Cuban band "Pocket Sized Planet".

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