Nancy Rumbel

NANCY RUMBEL is a professional composer, recording artist, performer and teacher. Her primary instruments are oboe, English horn, double wooden ocarinas, clay ocarinas and keyboards. She is well known for her work for the past 34 years with the GRAMMY award-winning duo Tingstad & Rumbel. She has also performed with and/or recorded on releases with Susan Osborn, the Paul Winter Consort, Jami Sieber, David Lanz, Cris Williamson, Catherine Marie Charlton, Wayne Gratz, Lydia McCauley, Linda Yapp, and countless others.

NANCY'S imaginative sound palettes and willingness to delve into uncharted solo performance and recording opportunities with musicians, film makers, dancers, writers, photographers, painters, bird watchers and even psychologists have provided her with a very interesting life. “People are often unfamiliar with the instruments I play and are curious and motivated to use them. Due to their uniqueness, I am as much of an educator as I am a performer, consequently, at times I can feel like a curiosity, an endangered species and a pioneer all rolled into one. I have been challenged and rewarded by finding ways to make my musical timbres “fit in”!

HER gifts, perseverance, sense of adventure, humor and good fortune have allowed her to share her music with thousands of people in hundreds of unique venues including: Carnegie Hall, the Ho-Am Award Ceremony in Seoul Korea, Buddhist temples in Japan, Yellowstone, Yosemite and Grand Canyon National Parks, the grey whale calfing grounds in Mexico, rural and urban America, the Missouri Botanic Garden, Bloedel Reserve, the Cibolo Nature Center and the International Feng-Ya Ocarina Festival in China to name a few. She has orchestrated several compositions as well as arranged and composed a concert of choral music.

SHE is a pro-active volunteer with MusiCares which provides emergency financial assistance to people in the music industry. She was the first woman to be a PNW Trustee for The Recording Academy which she served for two terms. She is a founding Board member of BirdNote.org, a two minute radio program about the intriguing stories, sounds and lives of birds for which she composed the theme song which is heard by over 2 million listeners daily.