As a founding member of the avant garde wind quintet The City of Tomorrow, Leander Star has been at the forefront of modern horn performance and led the group into new directions of programming, producing seamless concept concerts that include lighting effects and creative movement to enhance the audience’s experience of the music. In the 2022-2023 season, Leander designed and choreographed their show, “Waves, Breaths, and Dead Cities,” a contemplation of music and isolation during the global pandemic, premiered by Crosstown Arts in Memphis, TN with video by filmmaker Breezy Lucia and set design by Celeste Von Ahnen. 

Leander has also led efforts within the City of Tomorrow to commission new works, forming a consortium to commission a new quintet with electronics by MacArthur Grant Fellow George Lewis in 2023 and landing the City of Tomorrow a Chamber Music America Classical Commissioning Grant in 2014 for a new work relating to climate change written by Yale composer Han Lash. 

For the past two years, Leander has been the ensemble hornist at the Composers’ Conference, now located at Avaloch Farms in New Hampshire. At the conference, he has had the opportunity to workshop, record, and premiere more than a dozen works by upcoming composers under the direction of Vimbayi Kaziboni. In 2020, Leander joined the Tuben Horn supergroup, the Lawrence Graduate Bayreuth Tuben Quintet. The politically and performatively charged ensemble has presented recitals and classes relating to creativity, inclusion, and multidisciplinary approaches at Oberlin College, the University of Michigan, and Northwestern University among others. 

In 2019, Star gave the North American premiere performance of Northlands II by Matthew Whittall in a performance with the Central Oregon Chamber Orchestra that also included Mozart's Horn Concerto K.447. Recently, Mr. Star has been featured as a soloist and chamber musician on the faculty series of both Rhodes College and the University of Mississippi, including a regional debut of David Byrd Marrow’s Meditations Vol. 1 for solo horn in 2021. In the 2016/17 season, he gave multiple recitals of the Brahms and Ligeti horn trios on series in the southeastern United States as well as on the San Francisco Conservatory of Music Alumni Concert Series. 

A Portland, Oregon native, Leander is a tenured member of the Oregon Ballet Theater and Portland Opera Orchestra and can often be found performing in the pit at the Keller Auditorium and in other venues in the Pacific Northwest. He commissioned and premiered a new work by Seattle composer Nat Evans at the 2015 Northwest Horn Symposium called How to Stay Dry in Western Oregon, based on Nat’s experiences and field recordings while hiking the Pacific Crest Trail and has performed Fantasie for Horns II by Vancouver composer Hildegarde Westerkamp all over the United States, including performances in Seattle, Portland, Eugene, Tennessee, and New York City. 

Mr. Star is a graduate of Northwestern University and San Francisco Conservatory of Music and studied with Gail Williams, William Barnewitz, Robert Ward, and John Ring. He taught horn for the past eight years at the University of Mississippi and at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee. Mr. Star joins the faculty of the University of Oregon as visiting assistant professor in Fall of 2023.