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Emily Switzer

Second Violin

Violinist Emily Switzer is a 2019 graduate of the Yale School of Music and 2017 graduate of Yale University. Former co-concertmaster of the Yale Symphony Orchestra, she is a winner of the 2015 Friends of Music Recital Competition, the 2016 William Waite Competition and a recipient of the 2016 Sharp Prize for Music. She has performed with numerous orchestras including the Colorado Symphony Orchestra, Lakewood Symphony, Denver Philharmonic, Littleton Symphony and Yale Symphony Orchestra. In January 2022, she performed with the Yale Philharmonia as a winner of the 2019 Woolsey Concerto Competition.

Recipient of the 2017 Yale Louis Sudler Prize for Excellence in the Performing Arts, the Yale Wrexham Prize and the Fry Cup for Contributions to the Arts, she has studied with Hyo Kang, Wendy Sharp, James Maurer, Kathleen Winkler, Jorja Fleezanis, Alexander Treger and Glenn Dicterow. An avid chamber musician and advocate of new music, she was a winner of the 2018 Yale Oneppo Chamber Music Competition, and in May of 2018 premiered a violin concerto by emerging composer Max Vinetz. She attended Music Academy of the West in 2015 and 2016, and in 2017 participated in their Global Academy Program, a 10-day immersive performance residency with the New York Philharmonic. She is a two-time fellow of the Tanglewood Music Center and in 2017 was awarded the program’s Jules C. Reiner Violin Prize. In June 2019 she traveled to Incheon, Korea, with Sejong Soloists as part of the Hic et Nunc music festival. Switzer joined the second violin section of the Minnesota Orchestra in September 2019.

I majored in English in college and wrote my thesis about the relationship between literary and painterly realism during the Industrial Revolution. I remain fascinated by the interplay between language, art, and music, and spend most of my free time fiddling about with some combination of the three.”