Betty Bang Mather

Betty Bang Mather, born on August 7, 1927, the author of books on 18th century music, first learned to play the flute through her father. She became a teacher at the University of Iowa where she performed in the faculty woodwind quintet. Betty Bang Mather lived in six houses in her native Emporia, Kansas, and attended high schools in Des Plaines, Illinois; South Orange, New Jersey; and Forest Hills (Queens), New York City. Her BMus is from the Oberlin Conservatory and her MA from Columbia Teachers’ College. Her flute teachers include H. Henry Zlotnik, Harry Peters (an oboist, as there was no flute teacher at Oberlin at the time), Arthur Lora, William Kincaid, Jean-Pierre Rampal, Gaston Crunelle, Gustav Scheck, and Roger Mather. During her high school and college years she played with the New York All-City High School Orchestra, Tanglewood Student Orchestra, Oberlin Orchestra, Juilliard Summer Scholarship Orchestra. and National Orchestral Association.

From 1952 to 1996 Mather taught flute at the University of Iowa, and for a few years team-taught a Baroque performance practices class there. It became one of the first universities to hire a full-time flute professor (when it hired Mather), to have an active faculty/staff woodwind quintet, to offer the PhD in composition and the DMA in musical performance, to invite high-level guest composers to work with students, and to support a Center for New Music.

In 1973, Mather married the British-born scientist, engineer, and flute teacher Roger Mather. On the basis of Roger’s flute clinics at various universities and his contract to write a book on flute playing, UI hired him part time and then as adjunct professor to share Betty’s teaching load. This gave them both time to research and write. He concentrated on tone production and she on the music.
Mather has presented concerts, lecture/demonstrations, seminars, and workshops in the United States, France, Germany, England, Switzerland, China, Taiwan, and New Zealand. Her articles, editions, and books have been reprinted (and translated in many cases) in Japan, Germany, Australia, Argentina, Switzerland, New Zealand, and the Netherlands. Her presentations and publications deal with expanding the flute repertoire, Baroque and Classical preludes and cadenzas, Baroque performance practices, Baroque dance, holistic approaches to learning and performance, and the poetic orations in Bach’s flute music.She is recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Flute Association (NFA) in the U.S. in 2012.