About

A first-prize winner in the Carmel Chamber Music Society Competition and a second-prize winner in the National Flute Association's Young Artist Competition, Dr. Kris Palmer is the director and conductor of the San Jose Youth Symphony's Avant and Avance Flute Choirs.

Kris performs regularly with Opera San Jose, Monterey Symphony, Santa Cruz Symphony, and Lamplighters Musical Theatre. She has also performed with California Symphony, San Francisco Chamber Orchestra, Houston Symphony, Modesto Symphony, Shreveport Symphony, and Ohio Light Opera Company. She is a former member of the New Mexico Symphony Orchestra and former Principal Flutist of the Chamber Orchestra of Albuquerque.

Kris is the director and founder of Black Cedar Chamber Music, featuring the rare ensemble of flute, cello, and guitar. Under her leadership Black Cedar has garnered multiple grants from InterMusic SF and the Zellerbach Family Foundation, commissioned eight new works for flute, cello, and guitar, released an album of new and re-discovered trios, and earned an invitation to the National Flute Association Convention. “You can easily see why this unique group has become a chamber music draw in the musically rich Bay Area,” writes James Manheim of AllMusic.com.

Kris created Local Composers in Public Libraries, where the Black Cedar Trio brings old and new chamber music to audiences across the San Francisco Bay Area in free public concerts at neighborhood public libraries.

She also created Chamber Music Outreach at the Arc of the East Bay, a partnership between Black Cedar and the Arc of the East Bay, providing free chamber music performances to thousands of adults with developmental disabilities at the Arc’s San Francisco Bay Area campuses. The organization named Kris their Bob Perrotti Volunteer of the Year in 2016.

Kris made her New York City recital debut at Carnegie Hall in 2001 to rave reviews as a winner in the Artists International Competition. The New York Concert Review called her performance “incisive and expressive…particularly enchanting…with sensuous tone and pace.”  She is also a first-prize winner in the Ruth Burr Awards in Houston, a fourth-prize winner in the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Young Artist Competition in Texas, and a finalist in both the Hemphill-Wells Sorantin Young Artist Awards in Texas and the William C. Byrd Competition in Michigan. Her solo album, Versailles, is a compilation of her own arrangements of French Baroque works. The New York Concert Review says, “She is clearly among the few current performers on any instrument to fully understand the nature of French Baroque music.”

Kris earned a Doctorate of Musical Arts with an emphasis in eighteenth-century performance practice from Rice University, where she worked as a graduate teaching assistant for seven years. She is the author of the book, Ornamentation According to C.P.E. Bach and J.J. Quantz, and she has contributed multiple articles on Baroque performance practice for California Music Teacher magazine. The American Music Teacher magazine writes, “Clearly, the author is knowledgeable about ornamentation.” She is a frequent guest lecturer on eighteenth-century performance practice techniques, with engagements at the Mid-Atlantic Flute Convention, Wichita State University, San Jose State University, Chabot College, the San Diego Flute Festival, multiple MTAC State Conventions, the San Francisco International Flute Festival, Skyline College's Flute Day, and the Areon Summer Flute Institute.

Kris is on the faculty of San Jose State University's Summer Flute Institute, she is an adjunct woodwind coach at Leigh High School in San Jose, and she also maintains two private flute studios in the Bay Area.

In addition to a Doctorate from Rice University, Kris holds a Master of Music from Rice University and a Bachelor of Music from the University of Southern California. She is grateful to her primary flute instructors Carol Wincenc, Isabelle Chapuis-Starr, John Thorne, Aralee Dorough, the late Roger S. Stevens, the late Walfrid Kujala, Anne Diener Zentner, Leone Buyse, and the late Gaetano Schiavone with the Conservatory of Santa Cecilia in Rome.