Heather Wootton has been a member of the horn section of the Calgary Philharmonic since 1993.
Before coming to Calgary, she was a member the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony Orchestra, the Stratford Festival Orchestra, and maintained an active and varied freelance career about southern Ontario.
Born in Provost, Alberta and raised largely in Ottawa, Ontario, Wootton received a bachelor of musical arts and an artists’ diploma in performance from the University of Western Ontario, and continued her studies with the Orchestral Training Program of the Royal Conservatory and the National Youth Orchestra of Canada. Her main teachers at that time included Robert Creech and Eugene Rittich.
Further studies included summers at the Keystone Brass Institute in Colorado, the Kent/Blossom Festival in Ohio, and the Festival Orchestra of the American Institute of Musical Studies in Graz, Austria. Wootton enjoyed studying with such artists as Richard Solis, Gail Williams, Bill Klingelhoffer, and Phillip Farkas.
From 2001 to 2008, she was guest soloist and horn instructor at the Summer Music on the Shannon music festival then based in Limerick, Ireland.
Wootton is an avid chamber musician and was a founding member of the chamber ensembles Rosa Selvatica, and Altius Brass. She loves to teach, is a sought after clinician, and finds great joy in helping students of all ages discover music and the horn.
In January of 2016, Wootton helped launch the Calgary Philharmonic’s Sistema-inspired PhilKids after-school music program. In the role of Lead Teaching Artist, she continues to lead a team helping children, who wouldn’t otherwise have the opportunity, learn to play an instrument and explore all the benefits that music can add to our lives.
She is Mum to Liam, a busy teenager, and enjoys being involved in her close-knit community of Wildwood, gardening, walking the family’s two border collies, and spending time at the family cottage in Ontario, her “little piece of heaven.”