She’s taking her talent to new heights
Uhart professor raises her music to the mountaintops with ‘Carries Weight’ project
Carrie Koffman is scaling the heights, and playing more than scales. With a saxophone in her backpack, she’s ascending mountains, performing at the peaks and documenting the experiences as a years-long performance project, “Carries Weight.” “Carries Weight” combines the hiking/climbing concept of “highpointing” with Koffman’s classical saxophone musical talent. The project began in December when Koffman, a professor of saxophone at the University of Hartford’s Hartt School of Music, ascended Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, the highest peak on the African continent.
“Performance art is not something I’ve dabbled in before,” said Koffman. “Most of my experience is with traditional concerts. But recently I’ve become interested in site-specific performances.”
Before conceiving “Carries Weight,” she blogged about playing sax while doing the historic spiritual Camino de Santiago pilgrimage walk in Spain. She’s also performed along the Wallace Stevens Walk, the self-guided tour about the famous Hartford poet.
Koffman’s instrument of choice is the soprano saxophone “because that’s all I can carry.” The instrument weighs five pounds.
The “carry” concept is more than a convenient pun on her first name.
“When you’re a backpacker, you’re measuring every little thing,” Koffman said. “We also all have situations where we’re carrying weight. It can have this meaning of having power, being in control, but for many people it can mean having a burden.
“Everybody’s got a different take on what this means to them. There’s an unlimited number of ways you can look at.”
She doesn’t just lug the saxophonist up the mountaintops, she also has to play it, which
has had its own weighty challenges.
“On Kilimanjaro in December, the conditions at the summit were so extreme I couldn’t play,” she said. “The summit was almost 20,000 feet. I experienced mountain sickness.
“It was an altered state. I had a facial edema. I couldn’t speak.
“I tried to play, but nothing came out at all. I had to simplify. I reverted to my student days and played the [University of ] Michigan
fight song.”
Koffman isn’t shying away from any of the challenges, but she’s limited by her own inexperience at serious climbing.
“I don’t have crampons,” she said. “I don’t know how to do rock climbing.”
Having an audience at the highpoint performances also isn’t necessary.
“It’s possible that others will join me, mostly to be present,” she said. “There may be an audience, but that’s not the thing itself.”
Before joining the Hartt faculty 20 years ago Koffman was a saxophone professor at the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque, then at Penn State University. She also taught at Boston University and was an adjunct professor for six years at the Yale School of Music.
Koffman performs regularly with several different saxophone quartets and also plays with the Hartford Symphony Orchestra when a saxophone is needed.
Koffman says she is only the 11th woman in history to make the rank of full professor in saxophone and that there’s still a gender disparity with the instrument. Among her commissions are some that speak specifically to women’s issues, including Stacy Garrop’s 2021 menopause-themed “Hot Flash.”
“Carries Weight” will “unfold over several years,” Koffman said, “but much of it will happen in the next few months.”
She is traveling the Netherlands this month, with plans to play at the high points of some U.S locations. She is also adding a multitude of other voices to the project. She has commissioned a variety of composers to write pieces based on the phrase “Carrying weight.”
“Working with living composers is a big aspect of what we do ,” Koffman said. “I’ve commissioned over 70 pieces. It’s the cornerstone of my career.”
She plans to record the compositions and also post videos from her on-site performances.
“This is an archived, recorded and live-performance project,” Koffman said.
She is also working with ceramic artist Lyn Harper, who for decades has been spreading her small sculpture cubes at significant sites around the world, where they become part of the environment. Harper has created a special new design for “Carries Weight.”
On her website, carriekoffman. com, Koffman is collecting stories around the same basic idea.