Dr. Matt Lammers

Violinist Matt Lammers earned his DMA at Rice University, where he was the Itzhak Perlman Fellow. 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. During summers, he teaches privately and coaches chamber music at the Stringwood Chamber Music Festival. His teachers include Paul Kantor, Carolyn Huebl, Christian Teal, and Ray Shows.

Matt is the newly appointed First Violinist of the Axiom Quartet. He also appears regularly with the Houston Trio, Kinetic Ensemble, Da Camera of Houston, Music in CONTEXT, Ventana Ballet, the Mercury Chamber Orchestra, Musiqa New Music Ensemble, and as a founding member of Austin Camerata. Active orchestrally, 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.

In 2019, as Executive Producer and first violinist, Matt was awarded the City of Houston’s generous Support for Artists and Creative Individuals Grant for commissioning the world premieres of composer Michael Alec Rose's exploratory chamber opera-ballet Lolly Willowes. Invested in historical performance as well as new music, he 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, proposing 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).