Maartje Booden - Recorder

Maartje gives recorder lessons at Music For Life. She had her first recorder lesson at the age of 8, with Alice van der Meer as her teacher, whoinspired her to never want to stop playing this instrument. Through the years of her childhood, Maartje started arranging more and more pop songs for recorder ensembles, as well as writing musicherself – in 2009, she made it to the finals of the composing contest Op weg naar het Nieuwjaarsconcert (organised by the Netherlands Wind Ensemble), and won a masterclass with thecomposer Calliope Tsoupaki. During these years, Maartje’s interest in playing the recorder in a pop band setting started growing more and more, and after hearing herself playing through a microphoneon the stage, she realised that this interest might as well last a lifetime.

This all resulted in entering the Bachelor’s program of the Recorder Department at the Conservatoryof Amsterdam, in which she followed lessons by Jorge Isaac, Erik Bosgraaf and others. At her methodology classes, Maartje has developed her own method for teaching music, in which theteaching material consists of pop music. With this method, Maartje gives recorder lessons, generalmusic education lessons, as well as the two combined.

In the years of the Live Electronics Masters that followed (again at the Conservatory of Amsterdam), Maartje has done further research on how to make the recorder function well within a pop band setting. Next to this, she has gained a lot of knowledge and skills in the area of sound effects, live video, sensors and all the required programming. All these qualities can be used to make the lessonsand exercises even more interesting!