Keith Underwood

2023 Lifetime Achievement Award

Keith Underwood, recipient of the 2023 NFA Lifetime Achievement Award, is considered one of the foremost flute pedagogues of his generation, as well as an expert on breathing techniques as it relates to wind players. He resides in Yonkers, New York, and is on the faculties of New York University’s Steinhardt School, The New School – Mannes School of Music, and Queens College, the Aaron Copland School of Music. He also teaches online.

Born in 1951 in New Haven, Connecticut, his father Kenneth was a professor at Wesleyan University and Yale Divinity School, a brilliant social scientist, and in the 1960s became advisor to President Kennedy. His mother Marjorie was assistant to the dean at Yale.

As a performer he has played with organizations including the New York Philharmonic, American Composers Orchestra, and Parnassus (with which he gave the American premiere of Elliott Carter’s solo flute piece Scrivo in Vento), and he is also principal flute of the Orchestra of New England. He has recorded with such diverse artists as Benjamin Verdery, Celine Dion, Kathleen Battle, Rod Stewart, Bobby McFerrin, and Anthony Newman. He can be heard playing the flute cadenza in the 1983 production of The Pirates of Penzance with Linda Ronstadt.

Every August for the past decade, he has traveled to California to give a weeklong masterclass at the Hidden Valley Music Seminars. In recent years, he and jazz flutist Ali Ryerson have combined classes from which emerged the Jazz Flute Big Band and the Japan Jazz Flute Big Band under the direction of Yuko Hoshi. In this idyllic setting, Keith, Ryerson, and award-winning Brazilian composer, flutist, and pianist Léa Freire create, perform, and teach together.

Before COVID Underwood traveled internationally to perform and give masterclasses. He has worked extensively with flutists and musicians from many prominent orchestras in the US and abroad, including the Boston, Minnesota, Houston, Dallas, Atlanta, and New Jersey symphony orchestras, The Cleveland Orchestra, and The Metropolitan Opera.

Underwood did an enormous amount of online teaching during COVID and used the isolation time to tweak his methods. He collaborated with other musicians internationally via the Internet, including Israeli jazz flutist Hadar Noiberg. Keith is again teaching in-person and is scheduled to give classes at NYU, Mannes, New England, Boston University, and Hidden Valley.

Keith Underwood’s teaching has touched thousands of students, and he has left an indelible mark on many of them. No matter how good or bad you were, you’d come out sounding better. He has given many flutists hope and, ultimately, he makes playing flute fun again.

Read Keith Underwood's The Flutist Quarterly tribute here.