Bard

I have sung my whole life and played piano since I learned how to read and write. I started composing my own songs in grade school and fell in love with the concept of bards when I first read about them in favorite novels, crafting harps and mandolins for my Barbies and making them bards and troubadours in play.

From first grade through high school, I took private classical piano lessons and jazz piano at Colburn those last two years. I sang in choirs from first grade through college and did jazz band as well as wrote and performed the music to the school plays from middle school also through college. I continued to study music, play it by ear, and write my own. While at university, I doubled-majored in music and English and studied Italian, a language closely tied to music.

In graduate school, I studied journalism and became a reporter, honing my storytelling skills in a different medium. Later, as a teacher in San Diego, I had a band with colleagues and students, and we would perform at the school. In private, I kept composing and built a treasure trove of songs.

After decades of singing and playing piano — and long wanting one — I bought a Celtic harp and taught myself to play, using the piano as a guide.

I had never stopped writing my own music in addition to setting my own melodies to poetry, prayer, and passages from literature and folk songs, and in my seventh year of high school English-teaching, I began bringing my harp into class to sing sections of the works we studied, like Odyssey and Beowulf, in their original medium of voice and lyre in order to make the works come further alive for the students and to inspire them to take ownership of the stories in their own ways. I have taught students harp along with their literature, and in English class, they have composed songs, written raps, and performed their work.

Years later, I presented and sang about this at (South by Southwest) SXSW Edu 2019 and then later during lockdown at the (Associazione Europea di Musica e Comunicazione) AEMC and New Chaucer Society Conferences and Don’t Block Your Blessings Festival and Der Nister.

I started producing my own music, first on Garage Band and then on LogicPro in 2016 and taught myself guitar in 2018 and 2019.

During the quarantine of 2020, I realized I could wait no longer and produced and released my first album, The Ill-Tempered Clavier, a piano-voice-driven jazz album, and several singles including one I had written for voice and harp’s retelling part of the Iliad, called “Song of Achilles: My Name Shall Live Forever”. I also started sharing live videos on Instagram and YouTube. You can watch some of them here.

That set me on a road I still walk today, crafting and sharing music regularly.

I called my production company Kairos Records because “kairos” is sacred, nonlinear time. Time governs everything — our lives and certainly music. But music transcends time. Music is kairos.

In 2021, still in lockdown, I bought a bowl back mandolin from Crete, taught myself mixing, mastering, Canva, and Squarespace (meta, I know), and in 2022, I bought a vegan Fiberskyn hand drum I still use in my music. I derive much pleasure and pride from designing my music art and often drawing for it too, as you can see from some of the pieces below.

I teach through interdisciplinary methods because I believe in and live by those modes too.

As of the middle of 2026, I have released 13 albums of original work (the latest in two forms — fully acoustic and acoustic + synths, the first of which is out as of 6/26/26, the second which is coming this week, and both of which you could listen to right now as digital downloads here along with an accompanying 30-page liner notes, lyric, and book book).

These comprise a Bardic Tetralogy: Bard, Old Wives’ Tales (Bard II), Hearth Song (The Cauldron of Inspiration, Part I), and Awen (The Cauldron of Inspiration, Part II).

They also include Time’s Cartographer, Peregrine, The Lost Album: By Land and sea, in Flight With me / Thee, Hinterlands, Sylvan Soul (An Instrumental Album of Nature and Seasonality), Illuminations, The Deep and Dazzling Darkness, and, as of 6/26/26, Being, Becoming and Being, Becoming + Synths.

Threading some of my strongest songs together, I shared two compilation albums: Tapestry, volumes I and II.

I have also made 20 extended plays, several with songs not on the albums, and some with traditional folk songs and covers and more than 70 singles, again some discrete and not repeated on either the albums of EPs.

I make these collections start to finish in my own home, composing, writing, playing, singing, recording, producing, mixing, mastering, sometimes drawing and taking photographs, graphic-designing, and promoting the works, and am very proud of them.

It has been a privilege and delight to collaborate with musicians in LA, San Diego, Dublin, Bristol, Montecassiano, London, and from Tel Aviv, Buenos Aires, and Moscow. I mostly sing my songs in English but have also done so in biblical Hebrew, modern and secular Hebrew, and Ladino.

I call some of my genres Medieval Jazz, Space Folk Noir, Mystic Blues, Literary Dreamscape Vaudeville, Americana Tango of the Imagination, Celtic Neoclassical, and Choral Groove Nostalgia.

Some of the epic tales about which I have sung are Gilgamesh, Iliad, Odyssey, Song of Songs and the Book of Ruth, Metamorphoses, The Aeneid, The Mabinogion, The Book of Taliesin, Beowulf, The Canterbury Tales, Le More d’Arthur and plays like Macbeth, with music to works by William Shakespeare, William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Burns, Emily Dickinson, Christina Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Clare, Edgar Allan Poe, Shlomo Halevi Alkabetz, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Herman Melville, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ra’hel Bluwstein, Lord Byron, and John Keats. I also share a fair amount of original instrumental music.

My music uses ancient and contemporary media to tell stories of life and death, journeys and homecoming, power and love, mortality and the natural world, and the act of storytelling, itself, all in the hope of better understanding the human condition and, along the way, of touching the soul.

You can find it on YouTube, Apple, Spotify, Amazon, Tidal, and Pandora. The links on the upper right of this Website will take you to my online musical spaces on those platforms.

My YouTube channel shares live performances and formal releases, and my Instagram (@deborahstokolmusic) shares live performances, photographs, drawings, and insights about my work and process as well as about that of others.