Hannah Porter Occeña Artist Interview
Hailed by the New York Times as possessing “rich tone and deft technique," Hannah Porter Occeña is Assistant Professor of Flute at the University of Northern Iowa and Principal Flutist of the Topeka Symphony Orchestra (Topeka, KS) and Colorado MahlerFest Orchestra (Boulder, CO). Committed to the rich heritage and new horizons of the repertoire, Hannah is active as a performer of brand new works, forgotten gems, and standards of the repertoire, and she strives to serve the widest possible audience in her performance. When not performing or teaching, Hannah enjoys distance running and spending time with her husband and their four children.
Can you give us 5 career highlights?
I've enjoyed a lot of really wonderful highlights in my career, but here are some of the more recent memorable experiences:
- 2024 - Soloist for the European premiere of Jennifer Higdon's "The Light That We Can Hear" at the Alba Music Festival in Alba, Italy.
- 2023-2024 - Performed four contemporary concertos with five different ensembles
- 2023 - Had a student in a master class recognize me from Spotify
- 2021 - Mu Phi Epsilon International Competition Winner
- 2019 - Joined the Colorado MahlerFest Orchestra as principal flute and joined the University of Northern Iowa faculty
How about 3 pivotal moments that were essential to creating the artist that you've become?
The first term during my master’s degree was one of the most pivotal periods in my professional development. For the first six weeks or so, my teacher, Clare Southworth, was convinced I was an “academic player” who would only play what was on the page but not more. Meanwhile, I was waiting for Clare to pick apart everything I did and tell me how she would play the Karg-Elert Caprices (my assigned etudes during those weeks). When I finally gave up on waiting to be told how to play and performed one of the Caprices the way I wanted to - with passion and musicality - I had one of the best lessons of my life. Clare gave me permission to use all of my musical training and instincts to develop my own unique voice. Her job, she explained, was to tell me when my interpretation wasn’t coming through, not to create an interpretation for me. I ran and am still running with the idea that there is something only I can say through music!
Failures have been really pivotal moments in my career, and there certainly have been more than three of them. I am the performer and teacher I am today because failures closed some doors and opened others.
At the outset of my professional career, I was wait-listed for an undergraduate spot at Carnegie Mellon and went to study with Mary Posses at the University of Missouri-Kansas City instead. I embraced new music performance partly because of UMKC and partly because I was wait-listed for the big orchestra festivals and decided to go to new music festivals instead. I lost count of the number of orchestra jobs I didn’t win. I have applied to over a dozen university jobs, most of which never called me for an interview. I won only one international performance competition, even though I entered multiple competitions per year between ages 13 and 30.
All the successes I can show in a bio and on a resume could probably be paired with double or triple the amount of failure. Through the failures, I learned about myself, pushed myself to achieve more technically and musically than I had before, and gave myself opportunities to launch projects that were interesting to me and that I thought others might find interesting too. I now have a really wonderful career that wouldn’t have happened without the failures.
What do you like best about teaching?
I love the problem-solving part of my job as a teacher. I love helping my students to learn to listen and evaluate their performances, imagine what they want to look/sound like, and figure out the path to get there.
While it is fun to see my high-flyers win competitions, it is even more gratifying to bring a student who had to struggle to their senior recital and to see them deliver a performance they could never have imagined giving a few years before.
What do you like best about performing?
I am a fairly introverted person. At social gatherings, I am much more comfortable having deep conversations with one or two people instead of working the room. However, when I get on stage, I feel totally in my element. I am a fiery, passionate extrovert who wants to draw everyone in the audience into the experience. I love bringing my audience on a journey with the full range of subtlety and color that I can deliver, and I love interacting and collaborating with the audience while I am on stage.
CD releases?
New Beginnings: Australian and American Duos for Flute and Piano (2013); Confluence (2020); Discovering Her Voice (2023); ConcerTea for Two (anticipated fall 2025 release). All are available on the major streaming platforms, and all feature at least one recording intended to be a premiere or a first reference recording of a work.
What does your schedule look like for the next 6 months?
Between now and the end of May, I am wrapping up the Topeka Symphony season, finishing the semester at UNI, where I have a couple of cool faculty chamber programs and some student recitals, and playing at Colorado MahlerFest (Mahler Symphony no. 6 this year).
In June, I will be finishing up my ConcerTea for two project, which is an album of flute concertos by women composers in their flute and piano reductions. In July, I am performing and teaching at the Cedar Valley Chamber Music summer festival and chamber music camp, and I will be performing at the International Clarinet Association festival in Dallas with my UNI colleague, Dr. Amanda McCandless. In August, I am bringing my flute studio to perform at the NFA convention in Atlanta and will also play on a program with Carol Wincenc and some of her other "former-students-now-professionals."
Then it is back to UNI and Topeka for the start of the 2025-26 year/season! I’m looking forward to helping run a Halloween-themed new music festival on campus in October, I will be playing a quartet concerto for the Topeka Symphony principal winds by Alyssa Morris, and sometime over the summer, I will plan out my faculty recital and touring program.
What are your goals personally? Professionally?
Ultimately, I want to live a good, faithful life worth imitating. I want to get to the end of my life knowing that I gave it my all and that I served all those in my path. More immediately, I want to be a solid, creative flutist, a great teacher, and the best wife, mom, daughter, sister, and friend I can be.
My big personal goal right now is getting my half marathon time down to 2 hours even (I am at 2:03:36). I also want to get several rooms in my house reorganized, and I’m slowly but surely trying to gain confidence speaking, not just reading, Spanish and French.
Professionally, I want to take the concertos by women and American composers that I have been working on over the last several years and start touring with them. I also plan to continue regular recording projects, focusing on music that is great for university-level performers but doesn’t yet have good reference recordings.
What inspires you the most in life?
Hands down, my children are my biggest inspiration! I have four kids, Veronica (11), Merryn (almost 6), Anneliese (3), and Thomas (1). I love seeing them learn to navigate the world and discover new things. They provide so much inspiration for me to practice, both because they give me character ideas to apply to pieces of music, and because I need to work to support them!
Who were your music mentors? and what did you learn from them?
First, my parents, Tom and Jenifer Porter. My dad is also a professional musician. He recently retired from his college choir position, and he’s enjoying more time to compose and to travel as a guest conductor and clinician. He taught me how to practice, how to strive for excellence, how to get up after a failure, how to focus on the things in life that really matter, and what "hospitality" means. My mom is not a professional musician, but she has a beautiful voice that she uses all the time. She taught me to make music because I love it, to stick with my commitments, and that small efforts done well over a long time yield good results (she and her siblings have been leading music at church beautifully for decades).
My first flute teacher was Linda Schmidt. She was a VP with the JW Pepper Music Company and taught a handful of flute students because she enjoyed it. Linda taught me that the most important thing about playing the flute was to have a beautiful sound. You can have all the fast fingers in the world, but if you don’t have a beautiful sound, no one will want to hear you play.
My high school band director, Bill Schmidt (Linda’s husband), drilled into all of his students the utmost professionalism. He also taught us that we needed to be all-in wherever we were. He subscribed to the philosophy that “when you work, you work hard, when you play, you play hard, and when you pray, you pray hard."
Mary Possess taught me all the things I didn’t know that I didn’t know about the professional flute world. I also learned with her how to take a piece apart and put it back together, and she encouraged me to say "yes" to all kinds of crazy projects as a way to network.
Clare Southworth taught me how to use my unique artistic voice and how to stop getting in my own way musically. She also inspired me to really listen to and watch professional violinists.
Working with Carol Wincenc continues to be a master class in developing a brand that is specific enough to be recognizable but flexible enough to encompass all the projects you could want to do over a 50+ year career. I also learned so much about color and note endings through playing duets in my lessons, and I continue to learn about pushing the boundaries of sound and expression by listening to Carol perform.
Can you give us 5 quirky, secret, fun, (don't think too much about this) hobbies, passions, or facts?
1) I love golden age mystery novels, and I have a copy of almost all of Agatha Christie’s output.
2) I have managed to pair a half marathon in the morning with a performance in the afternoon on four occasions. I highly recommend training for both!
3) I walked only on tiptoe when I was little, and I still do when I am walking barefooted around the house.
4) I crochet when I get the chance, mostly baby blankets for friends and family right now, but it changes depending on the seasons friends and family are in. I’m a bit behind on blankets for my nieces and nephews, as we’ve added more family recently than my limited crochet time can keep up with!
5) I love listening to audiobooks while I drive and when I am out on a run. My favorite listen lately was a self-help gem called Likeable Badass: How Women Get the Success They Deserve by Alison Fragale.
What 3 things would you offer as advice for a young flutist?
1) Focus on the fundamentals, especially tone, and be patient! It is so much better to learn a piece or a skill well the first time than to spend weeks/months/years unlearning a bad habit we developed because we weren’t patient.
2) Take some risks in your performance. I have learned so much about myself and what I am capable of because I chose not to play things safe in a performance or a recording session. Sometimes risks pay off with the best performance of your life, and sometimes you learn how to recover from mistakes. Both are valuable!
3) Practice the hard things, but also always have something on your music stand that you absolutely love playing. That way, when you’re frustrated with the piece you HAVE to play (for an audition, job, etc.), you can take a quick break to refocus with a piece that reminds you how much joy you get out of playing your instrument.
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