Biography

Jonathan Bagg is Professor of the Practice at Duke University and violist with the Ciompi String Quartet. His career with the Ciompi includes hundreds of concerts across the U.S. and around the world, as well as dozens of recordings. He is founding Artistic Director of Electric Earth Concerts in New Hampshire, and he directed the Monadnock Music festival from 2007-2011. As an Artistic Director, his programming has included many creative collaborations with composers, authors, poets, and choreographers resulting in a number of unique multi-media works. 

He has performed at the Portland and Sebago-Long Lake festivals in Maine, Detroit’s Great Lakes Festival, the Eastern Music Festival and the Highlands festival in North Carolina, and the Mohawk Trail and Castle Hill festivals in Massachusetts.

From 2015-2020, Bagg was principal violist and soloist with the CityMusic Cleveland chamber orchestra. As an orchestral player he appeared often with the Boston Symphony, Boston’s Handel and Haydn Society Orchestra, the New Haven Symphony, and the New Hampshire Symphony, where he was principal viola. 

Bagg’s most recent CD on the Albany label, titled “Elation,” brings together several works he commissioned, including a sonata and trio by Duke colleague Stephen Jaffe and a trio by Scott Lindroth. His other solo CDs contain music for viola and piano by Robert and Clara Schumann, and by the Viennese composer Robert Fuchs. Contemporary solo works by Robert Ward, Arthur Levering, Malcolm Peyton, and Donald Wheelock are on Bridge, Albany, Centaur and Gasparo Records. 

Currently Chair in the Department of Music, Bagg has directed the chamber music program at Duke, and he has served as Director of Undergraduate Studies and Director of Performance.