Margaret McGillivray is a horn-wielding, piano-tickling musical warrior

with a commitment to the highest levels of collaborative music making and learning. Based in Maryland, she is an accomplished soloist, orchestral and chamber musician, educator and passionate advocate for historically excluded musicians and composers in the classical music world. 

Born on the Canadian prairies and raised in the Toronto suburbs, Margaret has spent much of her life and career straddling cultures, provinces, countries and instruments as she moved across the world. Uncomfortably comfortable in the in-between places after years of being a freelance musician and military spouse, she has forged a career of her own making and is always learning how to stay grounded in her dreams and values without being tethered to the expectations of others.

Margaret is an accomplished orchestral player, performing with ensembles throughout Canada, Germany, Japan, the UK and the US. She is regularly engaged by orchestras including the National, Baltimore, Lancaster, Richmond, Phoenix and Tucson Symphonies. As a recitalist, she has given several US and regional premieres, including the premiere of Keith Bissell’s Sonata for Horn and the Southwest premiere ofJacques Hetu’s Cor-Jupitre. Alongside her passion for bringing Canadian composers to a wider international audience, she is dedicated to using her privilege to raise the voices of underrepresented composers in a new project to premiere in 2023.

The pandemic proved to be just the kick in the pants that Margaret needed to get her latest project up and running. Lift: Solos for Horn by Black Composers is a long-term dream come to fruition: a collection of pedagogically-appropriate solo music for her students by living composers who look like them and less like super dead white guys. Margaret’s frustration with the limited range of repertoire for her high school students and the lack of representation in festival and contest lists for horn led her to commission twelve Black composers to write music that fits developing horn players of today and will become the classics of horn repertoire in the future.

As a teacher and clinician, Margaret has worked with groups from elementary ages to college-level horn players and accomplished adult amateurs. Her students have won spots in Maryland and Arizona All-State, Regional and County Honor Ensembles and gone on to attend the University of Toronto, Duke University, Belmont University, Cal-Poly Pomona, the University of William and Mary and Liberty University as music majors and minors. Margaret developed the community-based horn bootcamp, HornWerk, where participants spend the day honing and developing technique, using their whole bodies to make music and movement, learn about horn repair and indulge in horn ensemble playing. She is passionate about talking to horn students from all levels about life off the beaten musical path and the realities, good and interesting, of a portfolio career. She has most recently developed a workshop aimed at band directors called French Horn Refresh and is excited to present a chance to brush up on all things horn technique and answer questions that educators maybe didn’t even know they had.

For any horn nerds still reading, Margaret’s primary teachers include John Zirbel, Gail Williams, Eugene Rittich, Dave Krehbiel, Jean Gauldreault, Joan Watson, Bill Barnewitz and Danny Katzen. She holds a Doctor of Musical Arts from the University of Arizona, a master’s from Northwestern University and an undergraduate degree from McGill University in Montréal. Before the horn became her constant companion, Margaret earned an ARCT from the Royal Conservatory (Toronto) in Piano Performance while still in high school.

Margaret’s music shenanigans take up a fair amount of time and she is actively supported in the pursuit of them by her partner, three well above-average children and one hairy english setter named Lefse. She creates a little margin here and there to laugh with close friends, drink decent red wine and read québecois murder mysteries.