News  
Art is Essential in the Michigan Daily

Katri's Colleagiate Lecturer award

UM RC faculty recital on March 25, 2022

Katri is given the Outstanding Contribution to Undergraduate Education Award

Katrimusic on youtube
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Katrimusic on instagram
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Mestiza Music, the documentary airing nationally on your PBS stations June 2016-January 2017!

Katrimusic on twitter

E3Q video "Lonesome Luke" released on facebook Aug.29.2013
 
a video from Drew DeFour, featuring Kin Curran "Don't Be Afraid to Sing the Songs You Love"

Katri on facebook

May Erlewine's album "Golden" won the "Jammie" of the year, and the "best Americana album of the year" in Grand Rapids, MI. GO May! And yes, Golden is epic.   

Welcome! 

I am overjoyed to see you here! I try to update this website as often as I can, but sometimes the most up to date information is through the links and the social media.

Recent times have been very good for self-reflection: I was happy to notice that I really love my teaching job. The big teaching news in 2023 was my award of the Collegiate Lecturer title. While I was completely floored by the kindness of my colleagues for the nomination, the best part really was to hear from the very dear students from the past! I stepped down as the Residential College Music Program Head after 21 years in August of 2025, and happily welcomed a new colleague Alex Wand, who took over that post. I'm still on faculty teaching and coordinating the RC chamber music class and my improv-based musicianship class Foundations of Music.  

I am delighted to be able to be performing regularly again as well. There have been challenges in the last few years - pandemic of course, but also a shoulder injury that sidelined me for a spell. I have learned so much about the body, and the cello, and maintenance, and so many other things. I have to be strategic about how much I take on, and I have definitely gotten better at saying no. 

Some of my favorite projects on campus include collaborations with colleagues and guest artists: most recently, we hosted a collaborative event "Art is Essential" as part of the inaugural Michigan Arts festival in October 2025. The Engaged Art Mart brought together student orgs, RC learning centers PCAP, Semester in Detroit, CWPS, some of the academic programs in the arts and larger campus organizations such as UMS and Arts Initiative. The pre-concerts talk and concert event were focused on existential, expressionist, enraged and experimental music from the last 100 years. I loved playing it all, but it was especially fun to perform side-by-side with students and my good friend guest artist Maria Sampen. In 2023 my colleagues at the UM Residential College, Jennifer Goltz-Taylor and Naki Sung Kripfgans, as well as my wonderful Muse Ensemble colleagues Kyoko Kashiwagi and Eva Stern came together to perform as part of the Arts&Resistance theme semester. We titled our project "Chamber Music in the Age of Resistance" - that age being any age, when resistance is necessary. You can read about the featured composers and see our program online. We performed six related concerts, and had an amazing time presenting this music in the context of resistance. The concert was video recorded, and it is available on the Katrimusic youtube channel.  

The pandemic and quarantine profoundly altered my sense of time, and while restricting many things, allowed for others. I was able to research composers, and discovered a few wonderful composers whose music I had not heard before - one of them in particular, Mel Bonis, caught my ear and my heart. Her piano quartet was one of the cornerstones of our resistance concert. Mel lived a middle-class life in the late 19th century Paris and experienced many things that one might associate with a woman of her class: an incredibly talented musician, she was allowed to study with the likes of Cesar Franck, but certainly not to have music as profession. Mélanie, or Madame Domange by her married name had to hide her femininity and publish music under "Mel" Bonis - but her composition was such that she WAS published (by Leduc!) and became the first female secretary of the Société des compositeurs de musique. Her Sonata for Cello and Piano was written in 1904 in a beautiful, mature romantic style with "impressionistic" overtones. Like her classmate Claude Debussy (who disliked the term "impressionism"), Mel blurs the lines of tonality with her use of the modes, octatonic, whole tone and chromatic scales and creates incredible sonic landscapes. We performed the sonata at the RC in 2022 as part of the recital Under Your Wings I Can Find Shelter from Ordinary Things. Naki and my performance of the slow movement of Mel's Cello Sonata is also available on youtube.     

AVAILABLE ONLINE: besides my own youtube channel (thanks to pianist Tuomas Juutilainen for impromptu video shoot at the end of; Brad Phillips for asking me to play on a track with Jeff Daniels, Brian Vander Ark, May Erlewine, the Brad Phillips Roots Music Strings etc),  
Mestiza Music, our PBS documentary, is finished playing on PBS stations nationwide. It is a 60-minute telling of our journey in cultural collaboration and merging of two musical ensembles, Andean pan pipe trio and western classical string quartet, through music of composer Gabriela Lena Frank.  The film was broadcast nationally starting in June 2016. WFYI Indianapolis has created a webpage for the documentary.

I am also proud of the volunteer work that I do, and realized that I should probably consider it a part of my career, because in this day and age a "career" can be a lot of different things and doesn't necessarily have to take a linear path. And so, through my kids I have become involved in dance education (not as a teacher but an administrator!) - who knew that it would be so much fun to be a part of a dance company board! So many things to consider when putting on a pandemic Nutcracker... I am also involved in the Professor Pentti Kaitera Charitable Fund at the Oulu University - it carries my grandfather's name and promotes health and well-being in Northern Finland.