New WTAMU Oboe Instructor Dr. Kathleen Carter Bell

Kathleen Carter Bell is an active educator, performer, and scholar based in Amarillo, where she teaches at West Texas A&M University and runs the Amarillo Oboe Academy. Kathleen previously served as Lecturer of Oboe at Tennessee State University and Auburn University. Kathleen, who is Principal Oboist with the Lubbock Symphony Orchestra and Associate Principal and English Horn with the West Texas Symphony, is also faculty for Indiana University’s Summer Music Clinic, the West Texas A&M Band and Orchestra Camp, and has taught multiple summers at the Interlochen Center for the Arts. Her trio, Elicio Winds, has been awarded several grants and their first CD, Convergence: Music and Cultural Legacy, was released in November 2023.

Recent and upcoming solo and chamber performances include a Chamber Music Amarillo performance of the Vaughan Williams Oboe Concerto, the National Flute Association Conference (Chicago), the College Music Society National Conferences (Rochester, Miami, Washington D.C.), the International Double Reed Society Conference (Boulder, Flagstaff), the International Clarinet Association Conference (Denver), and the Music by Women Festival (Mississippi).

Kathleen is also committed to supporting music educators. She regularly gives regional presentations and workshops, and has launched the “Double Talk Workshop,” an initiative begun to give educators access to double reed resources and strategies. Bell recently published several pedagogical articles for music education journals and in spring 2024 she was named Review Editor for the International Alliance for Women in Music Journal.

Her DM document, From Dionysus to Die Walküre: The Ancient Greek Aulos as a Key to Wagner’s Writing for the Oboe and English Horn, was commended by her Indiana University doctoral committee as a “Dissertation of High Distinction.” In 2012, Kathleen was awarded the IU Barbara and David H. Jacobs Fellowship, granted for “excellence and leadership in the world of music.”