Dr. Matt Lammers

Co-Founder and Co-Director
matt.lammers@opus1chambermusic.org

Violinist Matt Lammers is a member of the American Prize-winning Axiom Quartet and the Mercury Chamber Orchestra. He is a Lecturer of Violin and Chamber Music at the Shepherd School of Music (Rice University), where he is also on the Preparatory Violin Faculty.

Now in its eleventh year and as Texas Touring Artists, the Axiom Quartet have given critically acclaimed performances and premieres across the U.S. and abroad. Their concert series’ in Houston attract a wide variety of audiences, known for their creative programming that combines traditional, undiscovered, and under-represented quartet repertoire from a variety of genres through multi-disciplinary storytelling and conversation. Matt appears regularly with the Mercury Chamber Orchestraand is also a Core Member of the Grammy-nominated and National Endowment for the Arts recipient Kinetic Ensemble, recognized as one of the nation’s most adventurous conductor-less chamber orchestras. He has performed and taught chamber music alongside members of the Miro, Concord, St. Lawrence, Carpe Diem, and Artaria Quartets, the St. Paul Chamber, Nashville, and Cleveland Orchestras, and soloists including Jinjoo Cho, Cho-Liang Lin, Wolfgang Rubsam, and Andres Diaz.

In 2019, Matt was awarded the City of Houston’s generous Support for Artists and Creative Individuals Grant for commissioning, producing, and performing Michael Alec Rose's chamber opera-ballet Lolly Willowes. Invested in historical performance as well as new music, he has published solo violin transcriptions of Lute Sonatas by Sylvius Leopold Weiss, as well as J.S. Bach’s D-minor Toccata and Fugue, proposing that it was composed 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.

Matt holds degrees from Vanderbilt University and Rice University, where he earned his DMA as the Itzhak Perlman Fellow. His primary teachers include Paul Kantor, Carolyn Huebl, and Christian Teal.