Kathleen Cowan

My music adventure started at 6 years old. My grandparents bought an upright player piano, we loaded it into a UHaul truck and drove 5 hours over the Cascade mountains in the middle of winter to our home in Sunnyside, WA. I started piano lessons which continued through high school. At 10, I started playing flute in the 5th grade school band. By the time I was in high school I was playing flute in the concert band and piano in the jazz band. At 17, my jazz band competed in a regional competition where I received an individual award for improvisation and a music scholarship.

I had planned to get a music degree with my scholarship but was dissuaded from doing so by family, so I paid my way through an EE program, graduated in a couple of years and joined IBM as a hardware engineer. While at IBM I was soon promoted to software engineer and eventually received a masters certification in Software Engineering at IBM Systems Research Institute/Suny in NYC. A few years later, I was in senior IT management. I worked for a few fortune 500 companies, specializing in turning around high-profile IT projects that were at risk for upper management and executives.

After 20+ years in corporate, my husband and I decided to start our family. Day care was not working out well for our young children. Then 9/11 happened when my youngest was 1 year old. This prompted us to rethink our priorities, so we both decided that I would take up the challenge of a lifetime--staying home to raise our kids.

Music was back, this time for our whole family. Our kids learned some piano plus the instruments they wanted to play. My husband picked up his violin.  I picked up my flute and started playing piano again.  The kids and I took lessons. I have studied flute under Julianna Nickel for several years and was in the jazz program at GMU for 2 years. I've played in several ensembles by now and I've been playing with Woodbridge Flute Choir for about 4 years.