She has taken that staple of the high school stage band, that building block of so many jazz dance bands and an instrument that bridges the earliest days of the music through to today, to a place of its own.
Sure, many have done similar, a select group giving it the presence of nurturing warmth and resonating colors. Virginia’s clarinet nurtures the groups she plays with, blending, leading, guiding, and lighting the ways of the lines and phrases. This is as evident in her compositions which so brilliantly compliment and celebrate the woody resonance and deeply, almost regal, vocal-like lyricism the reed instrument is instantly recognized for. Hannah Edgar in a Downbeat article about the clarinetist uses the word eloquent. The instrument has a storied history of that and with it.
MacDonald is telling new and exciting chapters.