Nathaniel D  

5

  5.0 (11)

Instruments: Violin, Viola, Mandolin, Electric Violin, Fiddle
Styles: Classical, Jazz, Pop, Rock, Blues, Folk, Country, R&B, Reggae, Swing, Punk, Avant-garde

I started violin at the age of three under Loraine Fink in the Los Angeles area. My family moved around frequently when I was young, and, as a result, I had had more than ten different teachers before I was thirteen. I played in many school and youth orchestras, and in high school I attended North Carolina School of the Arts (now University of North Carolina School of the Arts) under the tutelage of Kevin Lawrence, one of the foremost pedagogical students of Ivan Galamian, who taught many illustrious violinists such as Itzhak Perlman and Pinchas Zukerman. His strict methods have left a mark on me with a die-hard devotion to the methods of Galamian, and I consider him to be the strongest influence on my sense of discipline as a musician. I attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2009, and it was there that I met a lot of very amazing string teachers, and I sought to be as diverse with my education as possible. I studied violin and viola while playing with a country band (picked up mandolin along the way,) and, in the last year, sought out jazz studies under Lawrence Gray to get a feel for basic jazz improvisation. I value the original music of individuals I run into in the local music scene here just as much as the somewhat antiquated music of classical composers, and, with a combination of these, I play out roughly three or four times a week and strive to always give the best performance I possibly can. The violin is not a very common instrument in any music scene outside of Nashville, and so when it is played, I believe it should always serve to dazzle, to move, and to inspire the listener, for this is the job of any musician!