Sebastian Ruth is an American violinist, violist, and music educator, and a 2010 MacArthur Fellow, receiving the award for "forging a new, multifaceted role beyond the concert hall for the twenty-first-century musician." [1]
He is the founder of Community MusicWorks in Providence, Rhode Island, which works with young people in Providence neighborhoods “teaching them how to play string instruments". [2]
In 2010, the program had 115 students, 51% Latino and 16% African-American. [3]
Ruth's concept for Community MusicWorks "is to be as intrinsic to the fabric of a community as a clinic, library or church." [4] Accordingly, the group "provides its students – who range from elementary to high school – with a long-term instrument loan, mentoring relationships with teachers, as well as opportunities through workshops and field trips." [4]
Ruth is a 1997 graduate of Brown University and a faculty member at the Yale School of Music. [1]
He also received a 2010 National Arts and Humanities Youth Program Award from Michelle Obama. [1]
In 2012, Strings Magazine listed him as among "the 25 most influential people in the string music world". [5]
The Juilliard String Quartet is a classical music string quartet founded in 1946 at the Juilliard School in New York by William Schuman. Since its inception, it has been the quartet-in-residence at the Juilliard School. It has received numerous awards, including four Grammys and membership in the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences Hall of Fame. In February 2011, the group received the NARAS Lifetime Achievement Award for its outstanding contributions to recorded classical music.
The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation is a private foundation that makes grants and impact investments to support non-profit organizations in approximately 50 countries around the world. It has an endowment of $7.0 billion and provides approximately $260 million annually in grants and impact investments. It is based in Chicago, and in 2014 it was the 12th-largest private foundation in the United States. It has awarded more than US$6.8 billion since its first grants in 1978.
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Robert Nathaniel Mann was a violinist, composer, conductor, and founding member of the Juilliard String Quartet, as well as a faculty member at the Manhattan School of Music. Mann, the first violinist at Juilliard, served on the school's string quartet for over fifty years until his retirement in 1997.
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The MacArthur Fellows Program, also known as the MacArthur Fellowship and commonly but unofficially known as the "Genius Grant", is a prize awarded annually by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation typically to between 20 and 30 individuals, working in any field, who have shown "extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits and a marked capacity for self-direction" and are citizens or residents of the United States.
Alicia Elsbeth Stallings is an American New Formalist and Philhellene poet and translator. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, she was named a 2011 MacArthur Fellow.
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Aaron Paul Dworkin is an American violinist and music educator.
Amir Muhsin Abo-Shaeer is an American teacher and mechanical engineer. In 2001, during his first year of teaching, he established the Dos Pueblos Engineering Academy (DPEA) on the Dos Pueblos High School campus. In addition to being the Director of the DPEA, he teaches physics, engineering, robotics, machining and manufacturing. His focused outreach efforts have yielded 50% female student enrollment in the DPEA. He also ran FRC Team 1717 as part of the academy program. He was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2010. He is the first high school teacher to win the award, as well as the first FIRST mentor to win the award for work relating to FIRST robotics.
Janice LaMarre is a Canadian concert violist.
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Gábor Ormai was a Hungarian violist and educator who was most famous as a co-founder of the Takács Quartet in 1975; a group with which he toured widely in performance, made several recording, and won multiple international awards up until just a few months before his death from cancer in 1995.
Sebastian Ruth MacArthur.