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Evelyn Walker
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To learn more about other instructors or view other historical bios you may click the links at left.

Martha Russell first uncovered the principles that she called Creative Motion after a lengthy personal study with a variety of teachers. She shared the knowledge of her discoveries with several students - who were also fellow teachers - inviting them to her home in LaJolla, California for several summer institutes held throughout the 1920's. After Mrs. Russell died in 1951, Margaret Allen who studied with Martha Russell played a key role in allowing for continued Creative Motion study by sponsoring a week-long workshop at her mountain-top estate near Berea, Kentucky.

Evelyn Walker
was a frequent attendee of the Windswept Music Workshop and served as member of the instructional team in those "early years." Through her efforts and the work of countless others, Creative Motion study has been passed from teacher to student through the years, and continues to this day.

Evelyn Walker was a tireless advocate for Creative Motion. She was a charter member of the Creative Motion Alliance, having been a Creative Motion teacher since the earliest days of the Windswept Workshop. Windswept Music Workshop in 1999 was dedicated to her memory.

We hope to have additional biographical information available soon.

Evelyn Walker brought many students to Windswept over the years,
one of whom was her own granddaughter, Julie Walker. 
The Acknowledgments section of an article by Julie Walker mentions her experiences at Windswept:

Acknowledgments:

When I was growing up, my grandmother, a piano teacher, took me and my sister Sarah to the Windswept Music Workshop in Berea, Kentucky every summer. There, we would take morning exercise classes, known as “body tuning,” in which we would prepare our “instruments” to play for Margaret Allen, the workshop’s founder and director. Margaret’s philosophy, known as “creative motion musicianship,” held that an artistic performance necessarily involved the whole body. Thus, after relaxing our bodies through yoga and yawning exercises in the morning, we would recondition them by moving musically to a piece of music that we had analyzed according to its rhythm and pattern of harmonic balances. In this way, we would be ready to perform the piece we had prepared for our afternoon tutorial with Margaret in an “expressive” manner.

Years later, while reading about the work of François Delsarte and his many followers in the United States, I was struck by a feeling that I was already familiar with it. Creative motion musicianship, it would seem, was simply one of many manifestations of what was once popularly known as the “expressive culture movement.” My grandmother, a lifelong supporter of the workshop, was a sixth-generation Delsartian. I thus begin my acknowledgments with a “thank you” to my grandmother, Evelyn Pickett Walker (1911–1998), for introducing me to one of the subjects of this book.

For more from Julia Walker's complete article, click here.

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02/03/2006
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