Dr. Matt Lammers

Violinist Matt Lammers earned his DMA at Rice University, where he was the Itzhak Perlman Fellow and a Graduate Instructor of Music Theory. He remains on the preparatory violin faculty of the Shepherd School of Music and is a coach, founder, and director of the Opus 1 Chamber Music School (Houston, TX). During summers, he teaches privately and coaches chamber music at the Stringwood Chamber Music Festival (Lanesboro, MN). His teachers include Paul Kantor (Rice University), Carolyn Huebl (Vanderbilt University), Christian Teal, and Ray Shows.

As a chamber musician, Matt appears regularly with the Kinetic Ensemble, Da Camera of Houston, Music in CONTEXT, and as a founding member of Austin Camerata. He has shared the stage with Jinjoo Cho, Cho-Liang Lin, Norman Fischer, Desmond Hoebig, James Dunham, Ivo van der Werff, Wolfgang Rubsam, the Carpe Diem, Cezanne, and Blair Quartets, and members of the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra. As an orchestral player, he is a substitute with the Minnesota Orchestra and was a Concertmaster of Rice University’s Symphony and Chamber Orchestras, where he led the Chamber Orchestra in its first unconducted symphonic performance.

Matt is devoted to innovating and experimenting with the creation, presentation, and performance of music. In 2019, as Executive Producer and first violinist, he commissioned the world premieres of composer Michael Alec Rose's exploratory chamber opera-ballet Lolly Willowes, for which Matt was awarded the City of Houston’s generous Support for Artists and Creative Individuals Grant. His other notable world premieres include Rose’s Three Interventions for processing string quartet at the Blanton Museum of Art (Austin, TX) and Jack Coen’s Hyperthymesia for violin and electronics. Equally invested in historical performance, Matt has self-published solo violin transcriptions of rarely heard Lute Sonatas by Sylvius Leopold Weiss, as well as J.S. Bach’s famous D-minor Toccata and Fugue for organ, postulating that it originated as a work for solo string instrument. The subject of his dissertation, A String Player’s Guide to Evaluating Sound and Playability, Matt also explores the effects of acoustical construction on the characteristics of violins with research partner and luthier Keith Hill (Nashville, TN). He performs on a 2019 Hill violin.