Chamber Music Tulsa: WindSync
Discovery Lab
April 17, 2026
A kids’ science museum isn’t the first place you would expect to see a world-class woodwind quintet. However, as a space that has “building community through exploration, exhibits, and play” as a key part of its mission, Discovery Lab turned out to be an appropriate host for an award-winning ensemble whose name is a tongue-in-cheek reference to a 1990s boy band.
For the conclusion of their Friday Gallery Series last week, Chamber Music Tulsa brought back WindSync, a five-person group consisting of Garrett Hudson on flute, Noah Kay on oboe, Graeme Steele Johnson on clarinet, Kara LaMoure on bassoon, and Anni Hochhalter on horn. The 2025-2026 season marks the 17th year that these performers have played together, touring internationally and playing some of the country’s biggest classical music stages such as Carnegie Hall, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Library of Congress. WindSync are unique in that they typically play a “self-generated repertoire” of in-house arrangements or commissioned pieces. This evening at Discovery Lab was no exception, with two arrangements by Kara LaMoure and two commissioned pieces, including Viet Cuong’s Flora, which was originally commissioned by Chamber Music Tulsa for WindSync several years ago.
The thread binding the evening’s pieces was an exploration of the impact of the French music teacher, conductor, and composer Nadia Boulanger on a diverse range of American artists. Born in 1887, Boulanger spent decades teaching in Paris and had many composers with a wide variety of styles come study with her, including Aaron Copland, Quincy Jones, and Leonard Bernstein. The first piece WindSync played in their Nadia tribute during this show was an arrangement of Etude no. 17 by Philip Glass, another composer who studied with Boulanger. WindSync reworked the etude to fit the wind quintet instrumentation, taking what was originally a flowing single-instrument piece and breaking it apart into a conversation between the five instruments that highlighted the counterpoint melodies within the piece—a technique that, appropriately, Glass focused on in his studies with Boulanger.
Complementing the Glass piece was a second arrangement by LaMoure of several works by the Swedish folk band Väsen which, in turn, were contemporary adaptations of pieces from the 1600 and 1700s by composers related to the pioneering biologist Carl Linnaeus. LaMoure translated parts written initially for nyckelharpa, viola, guitar, percussion into a piece that gave the winds an opportunity to mimic the stringed and rhythmic instruments and showcase the wide range of sounds possible with a wind quintet. Though this piece was not explicitly tied to Boulanger, LaMoure noted that it was included in the program to showcase the diversity of influences on the quintet itself, much in the same way that Boulanger had a deep impact on American music.
Commissioned works were interspersed throughout the arrangements and proved to be the highlights of the evening. Arrangements may provide a new lens through which to see previously created works, while live performances of pieces by contemporary composers afford the opportunity to listen to those pieces in a fresh way. No matter how far from the original they may be stylistically, arrangements and canonical pieces always have some reference to an existing body of performances and recordings. Etude no. 17, for instance, can’t fully be isolated from all of the recordings that already exist or all the writings on how someone should interpret Philip Glass’s etudes. But commissioned works like the ones presented at this show are unique in that they don’t often exist anywhere outside of the performance. No recordings exist of Akshaya Tucker’s What will you hold or Viet Cuong’s Flora, and, as was noted in WindSync’s intro to the Cuong piece, commissions often have exclusivity riders built in so that other performers can’t play the pieces.