Getting to know Kimberly Marshall

Kimberly Marshall maintains an active career as a concert organist, performing regularly in Europe, the US and Asia. She currently holds the Patricia and Leonard Goldman Endowed Professorship in Organ at Arizona State University and serves as Director of the ASU School of Music. She previously held teaching positions at the Royal Academy of Music, London, and Stanford University, California. Winner of the St. Albans Competition in 1985, she has been invited to play in prestigious venues and has recorded for Radio-France, the BBC, and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

Kimberly Marshall has performed throughout Europe, including concerts in London's Royal Festival Hall and Westminster Cathedral, King's College, Cambridge, Norte-Dame Cathedral, Paris, Chartres and Uppsala Cathedrals, as well as the Dormition Abbey in Jerusalem. She has also performed on many historical organs, such as the Couperin organ at Saint-Gervais, Paris, the Gothic organ in Sion, Switzerland, and the Cahmann organ in Leufstabruk, Sweden. She especially enjoys tailoring programs to the styles of the instruments she plays, as is evident from her recordings of Italian and Spanish music on historical organs. Her playing is informed by research into obscure repertoire and by knowledge of performance practice, although she does not limit herself to early music. While at Stanford and the Royal Academy of Music, she gave performances of organ works by Ligeti in the presence of the composer, and she has been an advocate for music by Margaret Sandresky, Dan Locklair and Ofer Ben-Amots. She is attracted to the organ by its vast possibilities of timbre and by the instrument’s complex development since its invention in the third century BCE. Her work reflects this enthusiasm for musical creativity and historical awareness.

Dr. Marshall’s compact disc recordings feature music of the Italian and Spanish Renaissance, French Classical and Romantic periods, and works by J. S. Bach. She has also released a recording of works for organ by female composers, “Divine Euterpe,” that includes music by Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel, Elfrida Andrée, and Ethyl Smyth. Kimberly Marshall was a recitalist and workshop leader during many National Conventions of the American Guild of Organists (Dallas, 1994; New York, 1996; Denver; 1998; Seattle 2000, Los Angeles 2004). From 1996-2000, she was affiliated with the Organ Research Center in Göteborg, Sweden, where she taught and performed. During the summer of 2001, she appeared in Seoul for the Korean Association of Organists and in Toronto for the Convention of the Royal College of Canadian Organists. Her recording of Chen Yi’s organ concerto with the Singapore Symphony was released in 2003 on the BIS label, and her anthologies of late-medieval and Renaissance organ music were published by Wayne Leupold Editions in 2000 and 2004.

Kimberly Marshall spent the spring of 2005 on sabbatical in Pistoia, Italy, where she researched early Italian organ music and performed on many historical organs, including those in Roskilde Cathedral (Denmark), the St. Laurenskerk, Alkmaar (Netherlands), the Jacobikirche Hamburg, as well as the famous Hildebrandt instrument in Naumburg, Germany, which Bach examined in 1746. During the summer of 2006, she presented concerts and workshops on early music in Sweden and Israel, and she was a featured artist for the 2007 Early English Organ Project in Oxford and the Festival for Historical Organs in Oaxaca, Mexico.