Kate Gibson Oswald draws her inspiration from nature and poetry, Celtic, Classical, and World music, art, history, and a growing spiritual perspective of the world.
Kate was given the most important creative music tools as a child. Every Saturday morning for two years, Kate participated in ORFF music classes with Margaret Huggett, a Renaissance and Baroque music specialist. Surrounded by string and percussion instruments of every description, including extinct Renaissance curiosities, the children had fun making music!
The Story
Born in the city of Ottawa, Kate moved at the age of fourteen to a 100 acre Century farm in the Ottawa Valley in Ontario, Canada. While Kate was throwing hay bales, hauling maple-sap buckets, piling wood for the furnace, riding her horse, and playing the viola in the high school orchestra, her mother, Margery, was exploring the new creative environment through art and poetry. Poems like Apple trees in December, Early April, Celebration, and Shifting Sand, featured on Kate’s new CD Musicians Canvas, were written at this time. The four Gibson girls regularly participated in the art classes their mother also offered in the little town nearby. Television was absent for most of these years, and books appeared regularly on the coffee table from the children’s department of the Public library, where Margery worked. Dad, a retired teacher, farmed and kept the home fires burning. (Literally)
At university Kate began to merge her artistic expressions. While working with wood and exploring black and white photography Kate began vocal training and re-discovered the recorder. She graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Art in 1981 and an obtained an Education degree in Art and Music in 1984 from Queens’ University, Kingston, Ontario.
Marrying in 1981, Kate spent the next 15 years raising her two children while maintaining a finger on the pulse of music and teaching art and recorder part-time. During this time she continued vocal training and performed with two premier chamber ensembles in Ontario and then British Columbia. The Oswald family moved to Vancouver Island in 1993.
In 1997 Kate and her family relocated to the Okanagan Valley in the interior of British Columbia. It was here that the Celtic Harp found its way into Kate’s hands. Charmed she was! It was one of those “Ah HA” moments as Kate bought her first Ron Wall 36 string walnut harp.
Initially self-taught, Kate attended her first International Harp Summer School in Wells, BC in 1999. Here over the next three summers she studied with some of North America’s finest harpists including: Kim Robertson, Sharlene Wallace, and Harper Tasche. Kate also performed with Debi Johnson and with a Celtic band called Finch Road during these early years of harping.
More recently, Kate is spending her time composing, teaching, recording and
performing solo and with the acclaimed trio AnamCara. Kate finds endless inspiration and joy performing and arranging with her soul-friends Debi Johnson and Caroline Mackay. AnamCara features dynamic vocal and instrumental arrangements with delicious vocal harmony, Celtic harps, percussion, recorders and keyboard. Working in many styles including Celtic, jazz, Latin, folk, sacred and classical, the group is part of the world music scene. In December 2003 AnamCara wrapped up its third concert season where standing ovations were a regular response to the inspired music! They have one self-titled CD.
© 2005 Kate Gibson Oswald. All rights reserved.
The Orff method of music doesn’t teach a child "how" to play any particular instrument. Instead it cultivates an understanding of music through a discovery of melody, rhythm, tone, harmony, dissonance, emotion and movement. Music theory was not a component.
