Our Story

Michael Kimbell has been a piano technician and free-lance composer since 1978. He has won numerous awards and accolades for his music compositions, which range from symphonic, chamber, choral, piano, harp, and vocal works to opera and children’s theatre music. His Arcadian Symphony, which juxtaposes contrapuntal gestures from classical and romantic suites and symphonies with a modern sensibility and idiom, has been performed by four different orchestras and was awarded First Prize by the Southern Arizona Symphony Orchestra.

For many years Michael was principal clarinetist and resident composer with the Golden Gate Symphony Orchestra in San Francisco and still plays with them as E-flat clarinetist. He is a member of ASCAP,  the Piano Technicians Guild (Registered Piano Technician since 1979), the American Musicological Society and the Viola da Gamba society of America. He studied clarinet with Donald Monataro of the Philadelphia Orchestra. He and his wife study the viola da gamba with Farley Pearce of San Francisco.

Michael received his D.M.A. in music composition in 1973 from Cornell University , having studied with Robert Palmer and Karel Husa at Cornell, and with John Davison and Alfred Swan at Haverford College. Michael then held assistant professorships at Johnson State College in Vermont and the University of the Pacific in Stockton, California.

Edith Kimbell is a free-lance short story writer, music editor and translator. Edith brings to English renditions of non-English vocal works a keen sense of poetic faithfulness and practical vocal diction, so demanded by singers.

Edith studied German and English literature and philology at Vienna University, the University of Saskatchewan and Cornell University, receiving her M.A. in German literature in 1969. She has taught at Johnson State College, Vermont.