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Karlin Love (b. 1956 in Anacortes, Washington State, USA) is a composer and performer living in Tasmania. She has bachelor degrees from Seattle Pacific University and the University of Washington (USA) where she studied composition with William O. Smith and Kenneth Benshoof, and M.A.(hons) through the University of Wollongong working with Houston Dunleavy and Wayne Dixon, and a PhD from the University of Queensland in composition education, with Margaret Barrett and Rob Davidson.

In 1989 Karlin moved to Australia to take the position of woodwind lecturer at the University of Tasmania in Launceston where she taught clarinet, saxophone, theory, composition and improvisation until 1997. She is now primarily a freelance performer, composer and teacher, having taught composition and music technology for the University's Faculty of Education and TAFE Tasmania, and worked with numerous senior secondary students. Performance opportunities taken are varied: guitar, clarinet, saxophone, and leather horns; jazz, classical, klezmer, and folk.
Karlin's composition interests include writing for lute, guitar, clarinet, symphonic winds, extending and expanding traditional sound worlds. Her works have been recorded by Clarity clarinet quartet and the University of Tasmania Wind Ensemble.

Founder of the Chordwainers leather instrument ensemble, Karlin works with the Tasmanian Leather Orchestra project of the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery in Launceston. She plays Bowhorns, the Black Rose, Pocopods, Mountain Harp and String Drums. Karlin's work with Garry Greenwood began with a performance for a 1994 exhibition. Following that performance, Garry built the first of the bowhorns which use saxophone mouthpieces. She premiered the new instrument within a recital of Australian clarinet music in the U.S.A. later that year. She has also composed for the instruments, most notably the Leather Concertino, premiered in Melbourne by the University of Tasmania Wind Orchestra and the Chordwainers; and music for the play Jocasta, by Stella Kent. Karlin's articles on the leather instruments have been published in the Australian Clarinet and Saxophone Journal and Sounds Australian.

Two residency highlights are a Dombrovskis Wilderness residency at Eddystone Point in North East Tasmania and a residency at Cataract Gorge, Launceston. Both are fantastic natural settings for reflecting upon the truly important things in life and letting those reflections find their way into music. She is very interested in a Christian spirituality of peace and justice which influences her composition, partly by making ensemble relationships more democratic and creative.

Karlin was the Australian Society for Music Education composer in residence in 2009 - this is when she composed even in the city you can still see stars for concert band. In 2012, Karlin and Susan King received a grant from Arts Tasmania to develop new music for 11-course French Baroque lute. Pieces from the set, entitled A Lute on the Geographe, have been performed by Susan in Australia, New Zealand and Europe.

What to listen to first? Karlin recommends: On Power: concerto for electric guitar and wind ensemble, Blackwater for alto flute and guitar, Emerald Boa for clarinet quartet. Then check out Suri Serenade, Pneumos, and All the Time in the World by the Chordwainers.

Karlin Greenstreet Love — current to February 2015