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SHORT BIO

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Ledah Finck is a violinist, violist, improviser, and composer based in NYC. A passionate performer, creator, and curator of contemporary classical and experimental music, she is a co-founder of the Bergamot Quartet, as well as Tropos (collective of composers and improvisers) and earspace ensemble (contemporary music ensemble based in Raleigh, NC).  As a composer, she has been commissioned by Imani Winds, Alarm Will Sound/Now Hear This, Ayane and Paul, the Bridge Ensemble, and The Peabody Community Chorus among others. Her music embodies a desire to create and share a sound-world in which the classical tradition, the folk music with which she grew up in the Blue Ridge Mountains, and an extensive improvisatory sensibility can be in productive dialogue. 

 

In 2019 she was invited to perform as part of the Sitka Summer Music Festival and the Lucerne Festival Alumni tour. With the Bergamot Quartet, she participated in the Ensemble Modern Chamber Music Academy in Innsbruck, the Quatuor Diotima Academy in France, the Next Festival of Emerging Artists, the Banff Centre Evolution of the String Quartet program, and the Young Artist Development Series in El Paso, TX. Ledah has also participated in Ensemble Modern's Klangspuren Academy, the Bang on a Can summer institute at MASS MoCA, Kneisel Hall Chamber Music Festival, the Aspen Music Festival and School, and the Yellow Barn Young Artists Program. She holds undergraduate and master’s degrees in violin performance and composition from the Peabody Conservatory, where she studied with Herbert Greenberg, Oscar Bettison, and Judah Adashi, and studied at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill on a Kenan Scholarship, a full fellowship for musical and academic merit. She plays a 2012 violin by her father, David Finck.  

 

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LONG BIO

 

Ledah Finck moves fluidly through worlds as a musician, performing her own compositions and appearing frequently as a classical soloist and chamber musician, fiddle and jazz player, and improviser.

 

An active supporter of contemporary music, Ledah is a co-creator of the Bergamot Quartet, a string quartet that plays the music of living composers. She is also a founding member/director of The Witches, a flute/violin duo that commissions new works as the heart of a modular ensemble and also works extensively with free improvisation exploring larger social contexts. Additionally, she was the violist of Trio Jinx, a flute/bass/viola ensemble which was a winner in 2016 of the Young Artist Development Series and has presented residencies in El Paso TX, Mesa AZ, Milford IA, and Sitka AK.

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She has spent her recent summers as a performer at the Banff Evolution of the String Quartet workshop, Next Festival of Emerging Artists, Quatuor Diotima Academy in France with the Bergamot Quartet, the Sitka Summer Music Festival led by cellist Zuill Bailey, the Lucerne Festival Academy and alumni tour, the Imani Winds Chamber Music Festival, Bang on a Can festival, the Kneisel Hall Chamber Festival, the Aspen Music Festival and School, the Yellow Barn Young Artist Program (for violin in 2012 and composition in 2014), the Green Mountain Chamber Music Institute, and the Eastern Music Festival. 

 

Ledah's compositions have been performed by Alarm Will Sound/Now Hear This, the Bergamot Quartet, confluss duo, the Bridge Ensemble with whom she was the 2017-2018 composer-in-residence, Baltimore Choral Arts Society, Jennifer Curtis of ICE, the Baltimore Chamber Choir, Maria Lambros, and the Peabody String Sinfonia. Drawing from her versatile musical interests and training, she has written prolifically for primarily small ensembles, including duos, trios, and quartets. She was awarded a New Music USA grant in 2019 to write a 20 minute work for the Bergamot Quartet + Terry Sweeney on drum kit, entitled In the Brink.

 

Ledah's other performance experience includes chamber music concerts of new works including an appearance on Princeton University's Sound Kitchen series performing "A Hundred Goodbyes" string quartet by Donnacha Dennehy with Courtney Orlando of Alarm Will Sound and Michael Kannen of the Brentano Quartet, and an appearance this summer with the Sitka Summer Music Festival as a violist. She has played in the Appalachian Symphony and Philharmonic Orchestras, University of North Carolina symphonies, the Durham Symphony, the Aspen Festival Orchestra, the ASTA National Honors Orchestra, the Peabody Concert and Symphony Orchestras, and the Peabody String Sinfonia. In 2011 she took grand prize in the collegiate division of the University of Delaware International Strings Competition, and was a soloist in 2013 with the Durham Symphony. She was selected as a finalist for the Peabody Institute's Yale Gordon concerto competition and William Marbury recital competition. 

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Ledah was a recipient in 2012 of the University of North Carolina's Kenan Music Scholarship, a full scholarship offered to four students a year for musical and academic merit. She attended UNC Chapel Hill under the teaching of Richard Luby and Jennifer Curtis. In 2016 she was awarded masters degrees in both violin and composition in the studios of Herbert Greenberg and Oscar Bettison.

 

She is from Boone, North Carolina and plays a violin completed in 2013 and a viola created in 2016 by her father, David Finck.