Amber Sudduth Bone
Affiliate Professor of Music; Voice
PAC 23; (360) 650-2015
Amber Sudduth Bone was born in Honolulu and grew up in Kona on the Big Island of Hawaii. After earning her Bachelor of Music in Vocal Performance at the University of Hawaii at Manoa she came to the Pacific Northwest for her Master of Music in Performance at the University of Washington. Her appointment at the UW to a voice teaching assistantship inspired her to pursue a post-baccalaureate in Music Education and she holds a public school teaching certificate with primary endorsements in General, Choral and Instrumental Music and Social Studies. Amber is currently a Doctor of Musical Arts candidate in Performance at the UW, where she has been a recipient of the Brechemin Performance Scholarship and the Mortar Board Alumni/Tolo Foundation scholarship for academic achievement, invited to teach a seminar for the Center for Instructional Development and Research, and named Lead Teaching Assistant for Applied Music. Her research interest is higher education curriculum design and voice pedagogy.
Amber has performed as Gretel and Little Red Riding Hood in public schools on almost all of the Hawaiian Islands with Hawaii Opera Theatre's Outreach program. Other roles have included Despina (Cosi fan tutte), Soeur Constance (Dialogues des Carmelites), the Fairy Godmother (Cendrillon), La Princesse (L’enfant et les sortileges), Columbine (Aria da capo), Lucia (Lucia di Lammermoor), Saffi (Der Zigeunerbaron) and Grace Farrell (Annie) in venues around the Northwest and in Hawaii. She has appeared recently as a concert and recital soloist with the Annas Bay Music Festival and the Master Chorus Eastside and is a past Hawaii state winner of the National Association of Teachers of Singing Competition. Amber has performed on the WWU stage as Baby Doe in The Ballad of Baby Doe and with the voice faculty quartet accompanying the Dance Department’s staging of Brahms’s Neue Liebesliederwalzer. This season she will appear with the Whatcom Symphony Orchestra as Gretel in Hansel and Gretel and in their Holiday Concert and Rodgers and Hammerstein Pops Concert, as well as with the Bellingham Chamber Chorale as the soprano soloist in the Messiah.
One of Amber's passions is conducting and playing keyboards for musicals, and she has served as Musical Director for Nathan Hale and Shorecrest High Schools, Alter Ego Productions at the UW Playhouse and as Assistant Musical Director at Inglemoor High School. Shows she has collaborated on include Urinetown, The Sound of Music, The Music Man, and Sweeney Todd. She has received a 5th Avenue Theatre Award nomination for “Outstanding Music Direction”.
Amber joined the Western Washington University voice faculty in the Fall of 2006. She is a member of the National Association of Teachers of Singing and the Music Educators National Conference and enjoys serving as an adjudicator and clinician. She actively pursues continued growth as a teacher of music and has attended pedagogy conferences at Indiana University and through the Washington Music Educators Association. Her voice studies have been under the direction of Thomas Harper and Annette Johansson.
Amber’s WWU Studio website and course materials can be found at http://myweb.facstaff.wwu.edu/bonea/appliedvoice. She also enjoys teaching the First Year Voice Masterclass which is online at http://myweb.facstaff.wwu.edu/bonea/music215. Amber also serves as instructor for Music 104 (The Art of Listening to Music) and Music 205 (Survey of Non-Western Cultures) through the WWU Department of Extended Education.