Meet the Musicians: Jeffrey Barker

The flute took hold of Jeffrey Barker in the fourth grade when his school’s band director presented his class with their instrument options. “There was no doubt in my mind, like, oh yeah, that’s the one, that’s my instrument,” Barker explains. The Seattle-raised artist never looked back, single-mindedly following his pursuit of music, from two years of high school at the Interlochen Arts Academy in Michigan to graduate school at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh, and eventually to his first gig playing with the Boise Philharmonic in 2009. Yet through it all, the Seattle Symphony was always “The One.”

“This was my hometown orchestra and the orchestra I grew up going to see when I was a kid.” It was also where he was taught and mentored by the Seattle Symphony’s longtime piccolo player, Zartouhi Dombourian-Eby. While Barker said playing with his home city’s orchestra seemed an unrealistic dream, his desire to do so fueled him through multiple auditions. He won a position on his third try and joined the Seattle Symphony in 2015. Since then, the Associate Principal Flute has immersed himself in the organization, whether it be serving on (or leading) various Symphony committees or making his mark via its Education and Community Engagement programs. Most notably, his work on the Lullaby Project — which pairs musicians with mothers experiencing homelessness to help them write personalized lullabies for their children — earned him a 2018 Ford Musician Award for Excellence in Community Service from the League of American Orchestras.

Outside of the orchestra, the self-styled indoorsy flutesman embraced quarantine, brushing up on his home chef and sourdough baking skills. “I was tending to my own sourdough starter long before the pandemic ... I did it before it was a cool thing to do.” He explored nature with his girlfriend, which included taking a backpacking trip up the Olympic Coast. In his own patch of the great outdoors, he gardened, “picking whatever happened to be ripe at the time and improvising, figuring out what cool thing I could make just with ingredients we have on hand from the garden.” In the summer, it was lots of lettuce and fresh salads. Most recently, it was a soup with a bunch of his own carrots. But his favorite thing to grow has been potatoes. “We’ve just got potatoes all over the place. Any time there is a dish I can throw some potatoes into, all I have to do is walk out to the yard and start digging, and I’ll find some potatoes. It’s my number one favorite thing to grow.”

Zartouhi Dombourian-Eby’s position is generously underwritten as the Robert & Clodagh Ash Piccolo.

The Seattle Symphony Lullaby Project is supported by Davis Wright Tremaine.

The Seattle Symphony’s Family, School & Community programs are supported by 4Culture, Arakawa Foundation, Marco Argenti, The Klorfine Foundation, Merriman-Ross Family, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Seattle Office of Arts & Culture, the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation, Maryanne Tagney, the Atsuhiko and Ina Goodwin Tateuchi Foundation and individual contributions to the Seattle Symphony Annual Fund.