In just 17 years, Nadine Dyskant-Miller has compiled a startling list of accomplishments. On the classical side of the ledger, the flutist won the 2009 Howard Hanson Young Composers' Competition, and will have her work performed by Chamber Music Rochester. On the traditional side of the flute, she also has been a familiar figure as a performer and participant in local contra dances, and has already recorded five songs for her first CD.
Nadine celebrates her 18th birthday Sunday in the most mixed of circumstances. Her friends Crowfoot, a rural, dance-infused folk trio born in Boston, but now with a following in Canada as well, play at 7 p.m. at Harmony House, 58 E. Main St., Webster. But it's also her benefit show. Shortly after moving here in May from Hinsdale, near Olean, so that she could take advantage of educational opportunities such as the Eastman Community Music School, Nadine was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia.
She is scheduled to compete in a flute competition on Friday, despite the fatigue brought on by aggressive chemotherapy. Nadine has productive days, and days when she's too exhausted to move. "It depends how many friends I have around me," she says of the better days. "And music."
While she is home-schooled, Nadine could hardly be called a homebody. One of her key mentors in flute is Nicholas Williams, who she met at Pennsylvania workshop. Later, he joined Crowfoot, which led to Nadine sitting in with the band for a few performances, including at the festival that the group hosts in Quebec. She's played throughout the East, sometimes in Confluence, a band that includes her keyboard-playing mother Barbara Dyskant. And while still academically a high-school senior, she has already accumulated 24 college credits with a straight-A average at Monroe Community College as she considers at what four-year colleges she will apply.
Classical or traditional flute? "I'm trying to figure that out right now," Nadine says. "There's no way I could choose between the two, they're so different. I want to find a way to play both. But maybe not at the same time."
She also writes award-winning short stories and makes jewelry. Practical jokes are an interest. During her hospital stay after her diagnosis, Nadine and some friends slipped some blue energy drink into an empty saline bag, popped a sponge dinosaur that grows when moistened in the bag, and hung it from the IV stand at her bedside. The medical staff did express some initial alarm.
The local group Teens Living With Cancer recently assembled theater people, photographers, sound designers and writers to help kids like Nadine tell their stories in short vignettes one evening at Temple B'rith Kodesh. Nadine's performance might strike some as curiously avant-garde.
As she played her flute, shadowy figures gathered, tossing gauze at her, while animation of falling objects such as syringes and physicians' masks were projected on a screen behind her; Nadine was in a snow globe. In a few moments, the objects stopped falling, the threatening figures slunk away, and she resumed playing. "It's about how I see myself and other people during this major change," she says. The snow globe is a metaphor. "I didn't know I was in it, my life before cancer, and then it was shaken, and all this stuff was falling on me.
"And then it settled."
