biography

Lucy Croasdale is a performer, collaborator, educator, and composer originally from Madison, WI. She is a multi-instrumentalist who has had the pleasure of playing in an array of musical genres. Her focus lately has been building her private saxophone studio in the Austin, Texas area while developing her professional musical voice.

When she was very young, she started off as a Suzuki violinist, eventually migrating to saxophone, and along the way, picked up guitar, voice, trumpet, bass clarinet, flute, piano, and mandolin, among other things. Since starting college, saxophone has become her main focus. In high school and early undergrad, she was concentrated on jazz and improvisation studies but has turned her attention more towards contemporary and classical saxophone lately.

Throughout her musical career so far, she’s received a few special honors. Some of which were attending the 2019 Essentially Ellington festival and competition, being commissioned by Lawrence University to compose an educational big band chart for the 2022 Fred Sturm Jazz Celebration Weekend, being a member of the Lawrence University Jazz Ensemble when they won the 2023 Outstanding Performance award for Large Jazz Ensemble – Undergraduate College category, and premiering a saxophone quartet concerto, Second Nature by Viet Coung, as a soloist with the University of Texas Wind Ensemble. Another endeavor she is proud of was when Lucy created and led a weekly beginner’s jazz workshop September 2021 – March 2022 where she taught improvisation lessons and lead the educational jazz jam that followed, in an effort to create accessibility to the genre. Along with the workshop, Lucy was a co-founder of LU’s Jazz and Gender Equality Initiative.

Lucy Croasdale earned her Master’s degree in Music Performance at The University of Texas at Austin where she studied with Dr. Stephen Page and earned a Bachelor of Music Performance with a Jazz Emphasis from Lawrence University where she studied with Steven Jordheim and Jose Encarnacion.