Violinist Timothy Summers is a member of the first violin section of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, and has performed on violin, viola, and occasionally mandolin with the orchestra at venues across the world.
He is co-founder of the Charlottesville Chamber Music Festival, of which he has been co-director for more than 25 years, and he served as second violinist of the Orpheus String Quartet. He currently teaches violin on the faculty of the Universität der Künste (UdK) Berlin, and has taught violin, orchestral playing, improvisation, and chamber music worldwide.
As co-director of the Charlottesville Chamber Music Festival with cellist Raphael Bell, Mr. Summers has presented hundreds of concerts focusing on the evolving relationship between European and American music, integrating literature, technology, and improvisation, and assembling star performers from all over the world for weeks of in-depth collaboration.
Additionally, he has performed as a chamber musician at festivals across the United States and Europe, and has performed extensively as an improviser with electronics. This year he will be Artistic Director of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra’s Musikwoche Hitzacker, designing a program connecting Bach’s algorithmic compositions with the work of Leibniz.
He was also a longtime participant in the Emmanuel Music cycle of Bach Cantatas in Boston, led by Craig Smith and John Harbison.
Mr. Summers is artistic director of the MCO’s ‘Future Presence’ VR project with sound artist Henrik Oppermann. These digital installations, which explore the power of polyphony and musical collaboration in spatial media, have appeared to critical acclaim at venues across the world, bringing rich musical meaning to the cutting edge of spatial computing technology. Current exhibitions bring unsurpassed sound quality and completeness to works of Mozart, Ives, Mendelssohn, Wagner, and Bach, combined with rich contextual material. He is co-founder of Reflekt.music, which makes immersive audio recordings for spatial computing environments.
Mr. Summers spent 2005-2006 as artist-in-residence at the Danish Institute of Electroacoustic Music in Århus, funded by a grant from the Fulbright Commission, and worked in collaboration with improvisation artist Steven Nachmanovitch on improvisation and digital music projects.
He holds an A.B. from Harvard University in English and American Literature and an M.M. in Violin Performance from the Juilliard School. Mr. Summers was a student of Ronald Copes and Robert Mann at the Juilliard School, Mark Rush at the University of Virginia, James Buswell at New England Conservatory, and Robert Levin at Harvard University.