ABOUT
Who is Sonic Escape?
Fiddle-dancing for thousands in Tiananmen Square. A flute concert on skis in the mountains of Vermont. Couchsurfing parties in the Arctic Circle. A cross-country caper in a busted $500 minivan. Adventure abounds when art rules life, and sharing it with the world is what Sonic Escape’s about!
Shawn Wyckoff and Maria Kaneko Millar founded Sonic Escape in 2009. Armed with flute & violin, their game plan - use hyper-instrumentals to fill hearts with indescribable joy - has landed them on hundreds of stages across 45 North American states, provinces and beyond! Maria and Shawn push themselves to the brink - singing, dancing, telling stories, and above all, playing their hearts out with a “wonderfully imaginative… anything goes sense of fun.” (The Washington Post)
Maria and Shawn have performed at Lincoln Center, Ottawa Chamberfest, Kennedy Center, Radio City Music Hall, Gershwin Theatre on Broadway and Carnegie Hall. Their workshops and residencies have empowered students from Iqaluit, Nunavut to Montgomery, Alabama to Guadalajara, Jalisco and their alma mater, The Juilliard School. Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, Chamber Music America and the Puffin Foundation have generously funded Sonic Escape's compositions, travels, and creation of a 5-day community residency.
Maria Kaneko Millar
Violinist/Composer/Speaker
Violinist, composer & speaker Maria Kaneko Millar has fiddle-danced the world from The Gershwin Theatre on Broadway to the Kennedy Center in Washington DC to Beijing’s Great Hall of the People. "Queen of the Fiddle: A Celtic Celebration with Maria Millar" – an orchestral show created and performed with conductor & composer Sean O’Loughlin – features Maria’s mix of Celtic-classical fiddling, improvisation, composition and dance. Maria has performed throughout the US, Canada, Mexico, Britain, Ireland, Norway, China and Japan, and her work has been showcased by The Canadian, British and American Broadcasting Corporations. 170 performances as the Solo Dancing Fiddler in "Riverdance On Broadway" and the North American and Asian Tours of "Riverdance: The Show" featured Maria’s improvised solos and simultaneous dance. She also performed in Radio City Music Hall’s "One World Jam" and premiered her creation for dancing violinist on CBC’s nationally-televised "The Great Canadian Music Dream."
Maria has sold her compositions as sheet music in 46 countries. Her solo violin creation "Sakura" – licensed by the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music – had a first-run printing of 12,400 copies sold in 93 countries. Maria’s great passion is improvisation: her arrangements and aural transcriptions of Asian, Celtic, Gypsy, Klezmer, Tango, Turkish, blues, jazz, hip hop, pop, rock and classical music have laid the foundation for fearless ad-libbing in any setting. Maria holds accelerated BM/MM’s in Violin Performance from The Juilliard School.
Shawn Wyckoff
Flutist/Speaker
Flutist & speaker Shawn Wyckoff has captivated audiences at Carnegie Hall, Avery Fisher Hall, Alice Tully Hall and the Kennedy Center Concert Hall. With a style described as "electrifying" and singular," his solo and chamber work has been featured in presentations on WQXR’s McGraw-Hill Young Artists Showcase and at Weill Recital Hall, Merkin Concert Hall, Bargemusic, The Library of Congress, The Rainbow Room, The Museum of Modern Art, The Guggenheim Museum, the United Nations, Bryant Park, Central Park and the Botanical Gardens of the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens.
Shawn’s orchestral work includes concerts with conductors Pierre Boulez, Leonard Slatkin and Kurt Masur. Shawn is a First Prize winner of The Judith Lapple National Flute Competition, the Flute Society of Washington Competition and The Friday Morning Music Club Woodwind Competition. For his leadership in the arts, he was named a Maryland Distinguished Scholar of the Arts and received the Stephen Brewster Award (as chosen by a panel of National Symphony Orchestra musicians), the John Philip Sousa Award and the National Alliance for Excellence Award.
Shawn was a scholarship student of Robert Langevin and Jeanne Baxtresser at The Juilliard School where he holds a BM in Flute Performance. Previously, as a National Symphony Orchestra Youth Fellow, Shawn was awarded lessons with NSO flutist Alice Weinreb.