Itzhak Perlman is an Israeli-American violinist. He has performed worldwide and throughout the United States, in venues that have included a state dinner for Elizabeth II at the White House in 2007, and at the 2009 inauguration of Barack Obama. He has conducted the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, the Philadelphia Orchestra, and the Westchester Philharmonic. In 2015, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Perlman has won 16 Grammy Awards, including a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, and four Emmy Awards.
Béla Anton Leoš Fleck is an American banjo player. An acclaimed virtuoso, he is an innovative and technically proficient pioneer and ambassador of the banjo, playing music from bluegrass, jazz, classical, rock and various world music genres. He is best known for his work with the bands New Grass Revival and Béla Fleck and the Flecktones. Fleck has won 17 Grammy Awards and been nominated 39 times.
Edgar Meyer is an American bassist and composer. His styles include classical, bluegrass, newgrass, and jazz. He has won seven Grammy Awards and been nominated ten times.
"Ashokan Farewell" is a musical piece composed by the American folk musician Jay Ungar in 1982. For many years, it served as a goodnight or farewell waltz at the annual Ashokan Fiddle & Dance Camps, run by Ungar and his wife Molly Mason, who gave the tune its name, at the Ashokan Field Campus of SUNY New Paltz in Upstate New York.
Christopher Scott Thile is an American mandolinist, singer, songwriter, composer, and radio personality, best known for his work in the progressive acoustic trio Nickel Creek and the acoustic folk and progressive bluegrass quintet Punch Brothers. He is a 2012 MacArthur Fellow. From 2016 to its cancellation in 2020, he hosted the radio variety show Live from Here.
Darol Robert Anger is an American violinist and founding member of The David Grisman Quintet.
Tim Kliphuis is a Dutch violinist renowned for mixing gypsy jazz with classical and folk music, whose recent works have been dedicated to raising awareness about climate change.
Matt Glaser is an American jazz and bluegrass violinist. He served as the chair of the string department at the Berklee College of Music for more than twenty-five years. He is now the founder and artistic director of Berklee's American Roots Music Program.
Stuart Ian Duncan is an American bluegrass musician who plays the fiddle, mandolin, guitar, and banjo.
Buddy Spicher is an American country music fiddle player. He is a member of The Nashville A-Team of session musicians, and is Grammy-nominated. He was nominated as Instrumentalist of the Year by CMA in 1983 and 1985. He was the first fiddler in the "Nashville Cats" series of the Country Music Hall of Fame. He recorded with virtually every major country star of the sixties, seventies, and early eighties, including Faron Young, Johnny Paycheck Little Jimmy Dickens, Reba McEntire, George Jones, Don Williams, Dolly Parton, Crystal Gayle, Loretta Lynn, Bob Wills, Asleep at the Wheel, Don Francisco, Ray Price, Willie Nelson, George Strait, Bill Monroe, David Allan Coe, and Emmylou Harris.
David Flynn is an Irish composer, musician, and the founder and artistic director of the Irish Memory Orchestra. Many of his works music merge the influence of traditional Irish music with contemporary classical music and jazz. He is also a multi-instrumentalist who works across many genres including classical, jazz, rock and traditional Irish music, with guitar being his main instrument.
Kate Lee O'Connor is a Grammy Award-winning singer, songwriter and fiddler. She is a co-lead singer, writer, and instrumentalist for the bluegrass band, O'Connor Band with Mark O'Connor, whose album, Coming Home, debuted at #1 on the Billboard Top Bluegrass Albums chart in August 2016. In 2019, she signed with Compass Records as half of the duo, O'Connor Lee, with Forrest O'Connor.
American fiddle-playing began with the early European settlers, who found that the small viol family of instruments were more portable and rugged than other instruments of the period. According to Ron Yule, "John Utie, a 1620 immigrant, settled in the North and is credited as being the first known fiddler on American soil". Early influences were Irish, Scottish, and English fiddle styles, as well as the more upper-class traditions of classical violin playing. Popular tunes included "Soldier's Joy", for which Robert Burns wrote lyrics, and other tunes such as "Flowers of Edinburgh" and "Tamlin," which have both been claimed by both Scottish and Irish lineages.
Jeremy Kittel is an American musician and composer. His primary instruments are the violin / fiddle and viola and he has worked in a number of genres including Celtic, Jazz, Pop, Classical, Bluegrass, Folk music, and more.
David Chesky is an American pianist, composer, producer, arranger, and co-founder of the independent, audiophile label Chesky Records. He is also co-founder and CEO of HDtracks, an online music store that sells high-resolution digital music.
Jerome Henry "Butch" Baldassari was an American mandolinist, recording artist, composer, and music teacher.
John Mock is an American multi-instrumentalist, composer, arranger, producer, and photographer with a particular interest in the topic of maritime history and culture.
Billy Contreras is an American jazz violinist and bluegrass fiddler, multi-instrumentalist, session player and educator.
Conni Ellisor is a contemporary American composer and violinist. She was trained at The Juilliard School and the University of Denver's University of Denver, Lamont School of Music, and rose to prominence as Composer-in-Residence of the Nashville Chamber Orchestra in the late 1990s. As a violinist, she has served as a member of the Denver Symphony, concertmaster of the Boulder Philharmonic, first violin in the Athena Quartet, and is now a top-call studio musician and member of the Nashville String Machine.
Matt Combs is an American studio musician, record producer, composer, arranger, and author in Nashville, Tennessee.
