Biography

Jonathan Bagg has performed hundreds of concerts in the U.S. and around the world as violist with the Ciompi String Quartet, including in Germany/Vienna (2024) and China (2025). He is Professor of the Practice at Duke University, where he has directed the chamber music program, taught viola, and performed extensively for many years. Bagg is co-Artistic Director of Electric Earth Concerts in New Hampshire, which he founded in 2012 with flutist Laura Gilbert. The two also co-directed New Hampshire’s Monadnock Music festival from 2007-2011. Their creative programming has included many collaborations with composers, authors, poets, and choreographers resulting in a number of unique multi-media works.

In the summers Bagg has performed at the Portland and the 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. Recitals and concerto appearances have brought him to venues such as the Philips Collection in Washington D.C., Jordan Hall in Boston, Woolsey Hall in New Haven, and numerous other locations across the U.S.

Bagg is principal violist and soloist with the CityMusic Cleveland chamber orchestra, where he performs throughout the year. Past orchestral appearances include the Boston Symphony, as well as Boston’s Handel and Haydn Society and several other leading musical organizations in New England.

Bagg has made over 20 recordings with the Ciompi Quartet, most recently “A Duke Moment” (2025) on New Focus featuring works by Duke colleagues Stephen Jaffe, Anthony Kelley, and Scott Lindroth. A new solo disc of Music by Marion Bauer, Ulysses Kay, and Margaret Bonds was released in 2026 on New Focus, with pianist Emely Phelps and Mimi Solomon. His 2014 solo CD on the Albany label, titled “Elation,” brings together several works he commissioned, including a sonata and trio by Jaffe, and a trio by Lindroth. 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.

Bagg was Chair of Duke’s Department of Music from 2019-2023 and he has also served as Director of Undergraduate Studies and Director of Performance. He holds an M.M. from the New England Conservatory and a B.A. from Yale.