Home     Future concerts     Past concerts     About  Intermedii     Members

Nancy Coons (alto) straddled two worlds and two professions all her life---music (more recently for fun) and writing (actual job). Between jaunts around Italy, Belgium, Switzerland, Luxembourg and France---where she researched travel articles, guide books and novels---she sang. She had been known to throw a velvet gown into her backpack and catch a post-concert night train to Provence for an olive oil pressing, and impressed Alpine shepherds with her rendition of the theme to Titanic, not because she sang well but because she sang in English. She grew up in a musical family. Her parents played candlelit duets on the end-to-end baby grands in the living room while tornadoes blew down bits of Grand Rapids, Michigan, and her sisters played Tijuana Brass arrangements with her on cornet and trombone while she learned to play the French horn. Educated in Michigan school choirs, bands, orchestras and musical comedies, she majored in horn and voice at the University of Michigan School of Music (while studying English, journalism and creative writing in the School of Literature, Science and the Arts across Ann Arbor), then spent four years in the horn section of the Arkansas Symphony. She found herself writing more about music than actually playing it, and gave up performing to edit Stagebill Magazine in the bowels of Lincoln Center (free Met tickets!). For ten years she didn’t play or sing a note. Instead, she wrote. In Luxembourg, she fell back in love with music at a mead-soaked medieval festival in Useldange, where she sang with Barbara and Colin on a haywagon, and never stopped singing since. She studied voice with Ionel Pantea, sang with La Psallette de Lorraine, the Ensemble Vocal du Luxembourg, and The Art of Music, and performed in grotesque makeup in the choruses of the Théâtre National du Luxembourg’s production of Strindberg’s Ein Traumspiel and Marco Kraus’s Le Mariage de Pythagore. In 1995, with Barbara and Colin, she spent a week at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, studying ensemble technique under the tutelage of The Hilliard Ensemble. Nancy met her husband, OPL horn player Mark Olson, in the pit orchestra of Die Fledermaus at U of M; 13 years later she hunted him down in Luxembourg. Mark and their daughters Elodie and Alice live in Rodemack, France. They were recently naturalized as French citizens.

Nancy's novel The Feasting Season was published in July 2007 by Algonquin Books.  For details of her other books, click here and enter her name in the search box.  -ed.

Nancy died on Sunday 24 June 2007 after a long illness during which she inspired all of us with her courage, humour, resilience and everlasting artistry.  Words cannot express what she meant to us.

Nancy's memorial page will be added to as time permits.