Lynn Hileman

Bassoonist Lynn Hileman's performances as a soloist and chamber musician have taken her around the world, with appearances in the United States, Europe, Latin America, and Asia at venues including the November Music and GLOW Festivals (the Netherlands), the Surround Festival (Belgium), Centro Mexicano para la Música y las Artes Sonoras (Mexico), Festival Internacional de Sopros (Brazil), National Sawdust, Park Avenue Armory, and the Long Play Festival (New York City). A career-long advocate of contemporary and experimental music, she is a founding member of the bassoon collectives Tuple Bassoon Duo, Dark in the Song, and The Rushes Ensemble, and a founding faculty member of the NewBassoon Institute, a summer program dedicated to contemporary performance techniques and repertoire for bassoon.

Equally at home in traditional genres, Lynn is Principal Bassoon of the Binghamton Philharmonic Orchestra and has previously served as Acting Principal Bassoon of the West Virginia and Wheeling Symphony Orchestras, with additional appearances with the Pittsburgh Symphony, Rochester Philharmonic, and Syracuse Symphony. Since moving to the San Francisco Bay Area, she has become a frequent presence in the region's orchestral scene, performing with the Fresno Philharmonic, Symphony San Jose, and Modesto Symphony, among others.

Lynn was Associate Professor of Bassoon at West Virginia University for sixteen years. She currently teaches bassoon at San José State University and the University of California–Davis, and serves on the musicianship faculty of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music Pre-College Division.

In addition to performing and teaching, Lynn is the founder of The Performance Practice and creator of Neurobiologically Informed Performance (NIP), a methodology that applies the scholarly rigor of historically informed performance to the science of learning and optimal performance. Drawing on research in neuroscience, skill acquisition, and flow, her work explores how musicians can more effectively learn, practice, and perform under pressure. Developed during her tenure at WVU, this work has been presented at the International Double Reed Society, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, UCLA, the University of Southern Mississippi, and the Meg Quigley Symposium/Bassoons Without Borders.

She holds degrees from the University of Michigan, Yale University, and the Eastman School of Music, where her teachers included John Hunt, K. David Van Hoesen, Frank Morelli, Christopher Millard, and Richard Beene.