Dr. Connie Frigo

Now in her second year of teaching at the University of Tennessee, saxophonist Connie Frigo, originally from New York, is a versatile performer and teacher skilled equally in traditional and contemporary repertoire. She has already built a strong saxophone class at UT, and founded and directed the UT Saxophone Project, an annual festival designed to highlight the virtuosity of the saxophone. Frigo’s performing credentials are extensive: As the baritone saxophonist with the New Century Saxophone Quartet, she tours nationally and internationally and specializes in grant writing and development for the Quartet; she spent six years as a member of the premiere U.S. Navy Band, Washington, D.C., winning that audition at only 21 years of age and remaining the youngest member of the band for three years; she also performs in the Odyssey Duo with pianist Rebecca Grausam. Before joining New Century Saxophone Quartet, she was in two prize-winning quartets at the prestigious Fischoff Chamber Music Competition in Indiana.

Frigo is passionate about collaborating with living composers, and has a particular interest in studying the commissioning process between performers and composers. A few composers whose music she has commissioned and premiered include Bang on a Can composer David Lang, American composer John Fitz Rogers, and Dutch composer Jacob ter Veldhuis. She is a specialist in Veldhuis' “boombox” music - music that combines live instruments with a soundtrack based on human speech audio samples from everyday life. She delivers frequent lectures and performances across the U.S. on his music and is a member of “Jacob TV’s Boombox Band.” She spent an awe-inspiring year as a Fulbright Scholar to the Netherlands where she became the first American to study with world-renown Dutch saxophonist Arno Bornkamp. Her collaborations with Bornkamp culminated in a joint solo tour across the southeast this past November. Frigo remains an active participant in national and international saxophone conferences, including her performance at the most recent World Saxophone Congress in Slovenia in July 2006.

Frigo’s degrees are from Ithaca College, the University of Illinois, the Conservatorium van Amsterdam, and the University of South Carolina. Her principal teachers include Steven Mauk, Debra Richtmeyer, Arno Bornkamp, and Clifford Leaman, respectively. Prior to her arrival to UT, she held faculty positions at Ithaca College and the University of South Carolina.