Lily SlatonBarker

Lily SlatonBarker grew up a Suzuki kid in Eagle River Alaska and is now pursuing full qualifications as a Suzuki Teacher. She is currently trained in Books 1-4 in violin and viola and plans to complete all 10 books for each instrument soon. She is returning to UO for a Master of Music in Violin Performance, with the Studio Teaching Specialization after graduating with a Bachelor of Music in 2024. She is studying viola as a second instrument during her Master’s degree as well. She holds a Graduate Educator position at UO in the Music Education and Pedagogy departments.

Lily has been playing violin since she was 7 years old. She’s been concert master of the Anchorage Youth Orchestra and West High Orchestra; at UO she’s been assistant concertmaster and principle second of the University of Oregon Symphony. She has performed as a soloist with Lalo’s Symphony Espagnole 1st movement with the Anchorage Youth Symphony and performed in Piano and String Quartets at UO. She has also performed with #instaballet, EDME, and for Eugene, Alaska, and New York based Churches.

Lily has been teaching since 2019, as a private teacher and an orchestra and chamber music coach. She has been employed by UO’s Community Music Institute (2022-2026), the Pavilanis School of Music (2022-2024), and has her own private studio based in Eugene, with a few online Alaskan students.

In her Undergraduate degree, Lily completed an Honors Thesis Project which allowed her to personally explore the Alexander Technique, Body-Mind Centering, Functional Anatomy, and the Feldenkrais Method, and connect her learning to violin teaching and playing. She continues to learn and explore with these somatic methods and aims to write and publish a Companion Book for Suzuki Book 1 involving exercises and explorations paired to the Suzuki Repertoire that illuminate anatomical knowledge, body awareness, and ergonomical playing for each student, based on Somatic principles. This will be a project she continues through all the Suzuki Books and will be furthered by teacher training classes in Somatic methods such as those listed above. One of her foci as a teacher is to set up students with the tools to understand their physical bodies, using form, posture, and body-awareness knowledge. She suffered from pain and tendonitis caused by violin before learning somatic methods of movement, and she wants her students to have the tools to avoid those issues.

Her violin teachers include Dawn Lindsay, Hal Grossman, Shelley Rich, and Dr. Sunmi Chang. Her teacher trainers include James Hutchins, Daniel Gee Cordova, Nancy Lokken, and Shelley Rich.