Malena McLaren

Malena McLaren is Professor of Clarinet at Northwestern State University of Louisiana. Her teachers include Keith Lemmons at the University of New Mexico and Dr. James Gillespie at the University of North Texas. She has performed solo and chamber repertoire throughout the United States, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, England, Spain, and Belgium. She is a core member of the Rapides Symphony Orchestra and performs regularly with other regional orchestras. Malena's scholarship includes two articles published in The Clarinet. She has appeared in solo recitals at International Clarinet Association ClarinetFest conferences and received a Magale Endowed Professorship in 2011 to support performance and archival research in Madrid. She served as Coordinator of the ICA Research Presentation Competition from 2014 through 2016 and now serves as the ICA State Chair for Louisiana. Malena presented a lecture recital at the 2015 ClarinetFest in Madrid and performed at the 2018 ClarinetFest in Belgium. She delivered a lecture at the 2021 ClarinetFest, was a guest lecturer at the University of California, Riverside, in 2023, and presents annually for the Clareidoscope Virtual Festival. More recently, another Magale Endowed Professorship supported a guest-artist recital in Alabama and a solo performance at the International Clarinet Society Low Clarinet Festival in January 2025. She gives recitals, presentations, and lectures regularly and enjoys collaborating with colleagues and students.

Malena McLaren performs on the Royal Global MAX Low C Bass and Concerto Soprano clarinets, paired with a Cohler barrel and a Vandoren M-13 mouthpiece (with the facing modified by Tim Wright). She is also an artist for D'Addario. She finds the instruments help her "achieve a richness of tone quality and consistency of sound throughout — no matter what style or size of group I am playing with," allowing her to "play freely and expressively in both solo and chamber music settings." As her instruments have broken in, they have, in her words, "only become more comfortable." A key factor in her choice was "the smoothness of sound between all registers" — what she describes as "free-blowing, but a wonderful core, focus, and roundness to the sound." Ultimately, the value of playing Royal is the artistic freedom it provides: "I feel like I can fully express myself musically on my Royal Global clarinets. There is an ease of playing and expressing myself that comes with these clarinets." Several of her students also play Royal Global clarinets, and they have been "immediately taken by the sound and consistency" of the instruments.