About

Who We Are

We are a welcoming group of musicians from all backgrounds who play for the love of making and sharing music.

We are you. We are teachers and engineers and students. Some of us have played professionally. Some of us have never played since high school. All of us have a love of music.

We volunteer in our community to share the benefits of music.

We are a "pay to play" community orchestra; we share the costs of rehearsal and performance. Dues are $20 per month.

We play for our community to inspire and encourage.

We work with each other to grow as musicians and members of our community.

Our conductor.

Marcin Pączkowski is a composer, conductor, and digital artist, working with both traditional and electronic media. As a conductor he leads the Evergreen Community Orchestra and Seattle-based new music collective Inverted Space. He is also a co-founder of the contemporary chamber vocal ensemble Pogratulujmy Mrówkom. His conducting performances with Inverted Space include Anahit by Giacinto Scelsi, featuring Luke Fitzpatrick on violin, Flurries by Brian Ferneyhough, and Hermetic Definition by Joël-François Durand. He has also lead premieres of numerous works in Poland and the United States.

As a composer, he is focused on developing new ways of creating and performing computer music. His pieces involving real-time gesture control using accelerometers have been performed at the International Computer Music Conference in Daegu, Korea, Music of Today concert series in Seattle, Washington, Northwest Percussion Festival in Ashland, Oregon, Toronto International Electroacoustic Symposium in Toronto, Canada, and the Audio Art festival in Kraków, Poland.

He received his Ph.D. from the Center for Digital Arts and Experimental Media (DXARTS) at the University of Washington in Seattle where he currently works as a Research Associate. He also received his Masters' degrees from the Academy of Music in Kraków, Poland (composition and conducting), and from the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington (composition). He was a grant recipient from Adam Mickiewicz Institute, Polish Institute of Music and Dance and from Lesser Poland Scholarship Foundation Sapere Auso.

Our rehearsal conductors:

ECO is very fortunate to have several exceptional guest conductors working with us from January through May, each of whom will conduct three or more rehearsals prior to our June concert.

Nse' Ekpo received his Doctor of Music Arts in Orchestral Conducting from the University of South Carolina in 2015. He currently is the Concert Band Director/Co-Orchestra Director at Lakeside School in Seattle. He has guest conducted for local orchestras such as the Issaquah Philharmonic and Seattle Pacific University Symphony Orchestra, as well as orchestras in other states and outside the U.S.

Jean DeWitt received her Bachelors of Arts in Education at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma in 1982 and has completed graduate level coursework at Seattle Pacific University. In her many years of teaching in school districts throughout the Puget Sound area, she has taught music to students from kindergarten to high school and conducted school orchestras in rehearsals and performances. Jean was the interim conductor for ECO's predecessor orchestra, the Music Hall Orchestra, and has served as concertmaster at many of our performances.

Takuya Nishiwaki received his DMA in Orchestral Conducting from the University of Maryland. He has taught music at Western Washington University's Academy of Lifelong Learning and is the Assistant Conductor of Whatcom Symphony Orchestra. He has also held various conducting and teaching positions in several U.S. states as well as in Japan.

Our board.

♫ Executive Director: Gwen Parker
♫ President: Michael Coats
♫ Vice President: Mark Wick
♫ Treasurer: Chris Hartzog
Secretary and ♫ Taker: Karen Wenzel
♫ Publicity: ReAna Hansen and Brenda Gonzalez
♫ Librarian: Don Wilson
♫ Members-at-large: Bert Crosby, Roy Wenzel

Our performance space.