Here's a little Lo-down on the Lo in LoNotesMusic!

 

Nurtured by musical parents on Italian opera, Methodist hymns, and Irish folk songs, Lo discovered a love for music at an early age. Growing up in the Netherlands gave her an added fascination FOR foreign languages, exotic cultures, and travel by any mode of transportation, bicycles in particular.

 

After briefly considering a career as an astronaut, she opted to study Spanish and piano instead, enduring the obligatory annual piano recital with the stoicism of one who knew herself completely unqualified for life as a concert pianist.  While earning a Masters Degree in Spanish, she acquired a reputation as a quirky writer and performer of bilingual parodies.  After a decade of teaching Spanish, she packed up her chalk and went on the road with the U.S. Foreign Service., wandering from Portugal to Burundi, South Africa to Israel, as well as to exotic Washington DC.

 

The things that make for peace became her passion and music her perfect travel companion. On every continent, she found people speaking the international language with varying rhythm and rhyme, and joining a chorus became her top priority in each new place (after finding the nearest grocery store and the best local beer).  While in DC, she has had the great joy of singing with the prestigious Washington Chorus and was privileged to be a part of that group's Grammy-winning performance of Britten’s War Requiem in 1995. 

 

While in South Africa in the late 90s, she began composing songs of personal, political, and spiritual inspiration. Her first musical, The Gospel of Mary, was composed and performed in Cape Town in 1999; a second song cycle, Amahoro, emerged from Lo's up close and personal view of the 2000-03 conflict in Israel/Palestine, and was recorded during a sabbatical in 2004.  After Lo retired from the Foreign Service, the songs kept coming - in the form of full-length musicals (Eve's Big Fat Family Reunion, Ellis!, Ponzi!, Bakuru), of solo songs and most recently, pieces for full choir and orchestra. 

 

While she's long since given up her diplomatic passport, Lo is still fully engaged in what she likes to call sing-song diplomacy from her home in Alexandria, Virginia.