Martin Hodel has performed as a soloist, chamber musician and orchestral player in the US and around the world. During the 2005-06 season he played full time in the trumpet section of the Minnesota Orchestra, with whom he has recorded and plays extra. As Principal and Solo Trumpet with the Eastman Wind Ensemble, Hodel toured the U.S. and Japan, and he has toured coast to coast in America with the Dallas Brass. He has also shared the stage with jazz artists Joe Henderson, Maria Schneider, Slide Hampton, Claudio Roditi, David Murray, and Jimmy Heath, and has toured Germany with organist Bradley Lehman as part of the Hodel-Lehman Duo. A CD by the Duo, In Thee is Gladness, recorded in Emden, Germany has been released on Larips Records. Hodel appears as a soloist on seven other compact discs, has performed live on the nationally-broadcast radio program, A Prairie Home Companion, on Minnesota Public Radio, on public television, and on national broadcasts of the radio programs Sing for Joy and PipeDreams.

Since 1997 he has been the trumpet professor at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota. Hodel holds a doctorate in trumpet performance and a performer’s certificate from the Eastman School of Music, a master of music from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a bachelor’s degree in music education from Goshen College. His teachers have included Charles Geyer, Barbara Butler, Allen Vizzutti, James Ketch, Raymond Mase, Craig Heitger, David Hickman, and Anthony Plog. On a recent sabbatical, Hodel studied Baroque (natural, valveless) trumpet and 18th-century trumpet literature in Europe with Dr. Edward H. Tarr, the leading expert on early trumpets and trumpet literature.