Jonathan E. Bagg
Professor of the Practice in the Department of Music

Jonathan Bagg is violist with the Ciompi String Quartet of Duke University. 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, also in New Hampshire, from 2007-2011. His programming as an Artistic Director has included creative collaborations with composers, authors, poets, and choreographers resulting in a number of unique multi-media works.

He has performed at the Portland Chamber Music Festival, the Sebago-Long Lake festival, the Great Lakes Festival, the Eastern Music Festival, the Highlands-Cashiers festival, and the Mohawk Trail and Castle Hill festivals.

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, the Handel and Haydn Society, 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 by Duke colleagues Stephen Jaffe and Scott Lindroth. Other solo CDs contain music for viola and piano by Robert and Clara Schumann, and by the Viennese composer Robert Fuchs. Contemporary works for viola by Robert Ward, Arthur Levering, Malcolm Peyton, and Donald Wheelock are on the Bridge, Albany, Centaur and Gasparo labels. 

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

Current Appointments & Affiliations

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