Kate MacDowell began her auspicious music career at the age of 2 with the piano (and was really pitiful at it). After many years of destroying “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” she left lessons and worked on her own style of playing and composition, which included a musical at age 10 called “Leaving New Jersey” (both it and she never did). She began singing at the age of 5 and entered professional training shortly thereafter and remained in professional training until she was 22. She attended a school for the performing arts training in voice, acting, and directing. She soon diversified further and began writing dramatic works. In college she worked at the George Street Playhouse and found herself increasingly focused on her lyrical composition work, as well as moving toward her other profession: psychology.
In 1995 she released her first EP, entitled “Baby Blue,” and formed her own record label, Little Green Jar. “Baby Blue” including work written in 1993 for a musical she had been writing and which led her to attend the ASCAP musical theater workshop as a special guest of composer Lucy Simon and Michael Kirker. Several songs on this EP, including “It Wasn’t Real” were a part of this early musical. “It Wasn’t Real” interestingly was based on a dream she had had when she was ten. In 1996 she recorded her full-length album “My Name Is…” (released in 1997), which included an array of pieces about her own life, news stories that angered her, and about the ever-present “Jefferson” who drifts through many of the songs both on this album on in the later release. (The tip here would be do not become romantically linked with her, otherwise songs will follow you.).
In 1998, she released her final vocal album: “Hitchhiker”. Her most self-reflective and dark album that opens with the song “When I Open Up My Mouth” which emerged after a concert as she contemplated the strange experience of sharing with an audience painful events of her life. At the same time, this album reflected the theme of moving on from painful events and a kind of guarded optimism for the future. Her favorite piece and the one she most readily identifies with even to this day is the song “She Waits,” reflective of piece that expresses a life-long desire to find a place of security while echoing a theme of ambivalence. Curiously the piano solo following this song was a riff Katie played in between recording that her Engineer happened to record. She considers this her “theme”. All of her lyrical work is linked together through repeated musical or lyrical themes throughout her albums reflecting her sense of life lived on a continuum of forward and backward steps and glances and the ideas that there are no isolated events, but that we incorporate all our experiences into how we unfold.
After a prolonged absence from music, Kate returned to composition in 2007 releasing an orchestral album entitled “9 Sacred Pillars” (of which “Communication” is a solo piano piece from this album). Finding a real love for orchestral writing, Kate turned her focus in 2010 toward a lengthy and still in-progress work entitled “Threnody for Earth” to express her love for the natural world and her despair of its ongoing destruction. “Harbinger” is the opening piece of this multi-part symphony. It is a chaotic, dissonant piece that seeks to illustrate the warning signs of a natural world heading toward extinction, all the while instilling a sense of possible optimism at the last chord and a sense of denial. In 2010, she orchestrated the hymn “This Is My Father’s World” to images of the Gulf Oil Spill to illustrate our horrific de-sanctifying of the natural world and its devastating consequences (watchable on her You Tube page).
Outside of her musical endeavors, Kate holds a masters in Counseling Psychology and recently left her doctoral program in Health and Clinical psychology as a doctoral candidate due to health issues. She also holds a doctorate in theology and three masters in religion (Buddhism, Christian History, and Comparative Religion). She is the author of two works of poetry (“Witness” and “Vestiges & Bones”) and three theology textbooks. She has spent 8 years as a psychotherapist and is a co-founder of the Ecopsychology Work Group. Her research articles have been published in numerous journals and magazines and are thematically focused on the relationship between humans and the natural world. She is the founder and dean of Ocean Seminary College as a means to provide barrier-free education and to facilitate the transformation of religions through educating future leaders toward thea/ological shifts in how the relationship between humans and nature are conceptualized.
In 2005, she was diagnosed with an unknown autoimmune disease and by 2010 she had suffered 12 stroke-like events—the first in 2006 paralyzed her vocal chords ending her singing; the last in 2009 left permanent right-side weakness ending her capacity to play the piano. Imaging studies have discovered what appears to be a progressive, motor-neuron disease of unknown etiology; however as of July 2010 her neurological symptoms have become partially remitted. She remains committed to her art and her academic work as a means of contributing to the world and hopefully impacting a few individuals to continue working toward a more peaceful, socially just, and ecologically mindful world.
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