Violinist Timothy Summers is a member of the first violin section of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra since 2009, and has performed on violin, viola, and occasionally mandolin with the orchestra at venues across the world. For eighteen years, he has been co-director of the Charlottesville Chamber Music Festival, which he also founded in 2000, and he is second violinist of the Orpheus String Quartet. Mr. Summers currently teaches violin and improvisation on the faculty of the Universität der Künste (UdK) Berlin, and has taught violin, orchestral playing, and chamber music in Spain, Germany, England, Finland, and Colombia.
Mr. Summers has performed as a chamber musician at festivals across the United States and Europe, and has also performed extensively as an improviser with electronics, He was also for several years a participant in the Emmanuel Music cycle of Bach Cantatas in Boston, led by the late Craig Smith and John Harbison.
Mr. Summers spent the 2005-2006 year as artist-in-residence at the Danish Institute of Electroacoustic Music in Århus, funded by a grant from the Fulbright Commission, and has worked for several years on improvisation and computer programming projects with improvisation artist Steven Nachmanovitch. He has also recently developed music learning tools and music reference tools for digital devices. The latest projects are a binary computational engine for musical harmony, Partito, and a metronome for harmonic progressions, HarmoGnome.
He holds an A.B. from Harvard University in English and American Literature and an M.M. in violin Performance from the Juilliard School. Timothy 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.
