Jamie Leigh Sampson
About Jamie
Jamie Leigh Sampson is a composer, bassoonist, author, teacher, and entrepreneur based in Western New York. She currently teaches music composition and entrepreneurship in the School of Music at the State University of New York at Fredonia. She is the Co-Owner of the publishing entity ADJ•ective New Music.
Sampson has written works across multiple genres of music, including opera, art song, instrumental and vocal chamber works, large-ensemble compositions, and electroacoustic music. She has had the privilege of writing new compositions for Amanda DeBoer Bartlett, Kayleigh Butcher, Ensemble Dal Niente, Quince Contemporary Vocal Ensemble, the Quanta Quartet, the University of North Texas Bands, and the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble. Her compositions have been described as “impressionistic, enabling the listener to focus on the beauty, timbre, and nuance of the singing” and “transcendentally moving” by the Brooklyn Rail.
Jamie’s research includes contemporary techniques for the bassoon, microtonal harmony, and entrepreneurship for musicians. Her first published resource, Contemporary Techniques for Bassoon: Multiphonics, documents thoroughly tested multiphonic fingerings from the preexisting body of repertoire, identifying and eliminating those found to be unreliable, and presents 271 stable fingerings in a concise and cogent format for bassoonists and composers. The book has been described as, “a jewel and necessity for all bassoonists,” by Thomas Dempster in Volume 37, No. 2 of The Double Reed (the International Double Reed Society journal). She has presented on the her research at Northwestern University’s New Music Conference (2014), the NewBassoon Workshop at Eastman (2016), the International Double Reed Society Conference (2016), the soundSCAPE Festival (2017), and various universities throughout the United States. Upcoming publications include Self-Publish or Perish: A Composers Guide to Self-Publishing, and Contemporary Techniques for the Bassoon: Microtone and Timbre Fingerings.