October 01, 2019
Alumna of Professional Performance program named community-embedded musician in Houston Symphony
Alexa Sangbin Thomson, Professional Performance Certificate (PPC) recipient in 2016, has just won a coveted position as a community-embedded musician in the Houston Symphony. Alexa came to Penn State from New Zealand to study with Prof. Tim Deighton, and used her PPC year at Penn State to prepare for graduate auditions. She was accepted and received scholarships at top schools, and recently completed her master's degree at Rice University.
She was one of 106 international applicants for the Houston Symphony's Community-Embedded Musician Program (CEM), and of those, 45 were invited to Houston for live auditions, interviews and teaching demonstrations with local schoolchildren, with two selected. They join two other musicians in the CEM program.
Pam Blaine, chief of education and community engagement, said that Community-Embedded Musicians must be "world-class artists who can perform with the Houston Symphony, then turn right around the next day and engage and enthrall a classroom of grade-schoolers, teaching them how to find meaning in art."