Fairmont State University Community Orchestra Performs Nov. 8
Distinguished viola soloist Maggie Snyder will perform works of Wagner, Stamitz and Mozart with the Fairmont State University Community Orchestra, conducted by John Ashton, on Sunday, Nov. 8, at 7:30 p.m. in the Turley Center Ballroom on the FSU main campus. Admission is free and open to the public.
Maggie Snyder, violist, has performed as a soloist and in orchestras throughout the United States as principal violist, solo concerto player and under well-known conductors. She has performed at the Kennedy Center, Carnegie Hall and the Seoul Arts Center, and has toured internationally as violist with the Metropolitan String Quartet and nationally with The Rafferty/Snyder Duo. She recently performed a recital of Russian Premieres of new American Music in St. Petersburg's House of Composers.
As an orchestral player, she has performed under such leading conductors as James Levine, Yuri Temirkanov, David Zinman, Robert Spano, Leonard Slatkin, James dePriest, Julius Rudel, James Conlon and Michael Tilson Thomas and at such festivals as the Aspen Music Festival where she was awarded the Time Warner Fellowship. She served as Principal of the Tuscaloosa Symphony Orchestra viola section and of the Meridian Symphony Orchestra viola section in Meridian, Miss. In the summer of 2004, Snyder enjoyed a three week residency with the Daejeon Philharmonic Orchestra in Daejeon, South Korea, on its subscription concerts and tour to Seoul. As a guest of that orchestra, Snyder performed coachings and sectionals, performed in live broadcasts and was part of an Arts Council Advisory Panel for the City of Daejeon.
In 2002, Snyder was appointed as the viola faculty at the University of Alabama, a post she took after teaching viola at Ohio University. In 2007, she joined the faculty at West Virginia University as Assistant Professor of Viola. She has given master classes, clinics at youth symphonies and performances at universities and top music schools throughout the country. She earned a Master of Music and Graduate Performance Diploma from The Peabody Conservatory of Music, where she was assistant to Victoria Chiang and received awards for outstanding string playing. She earned a Bachelor of Music from the University of Memphis, where she received a National Pressar Scholar Award.
In 2001, Snyder was a semi-finalist at the Primrose Memorial Scholarship Competition in Chicago. Her principal teachers have been Victoria Chiang, Heidi Castleman and Lenny Schranze. She has participated in masterclasses with and studied with such esteemed teachers at James Dunham, Jeffery Irvine, Roberto Diaz, Joseph de Pasquale, Laurence Dutton and Richard Field of the Baltimore Symphony, and has coached chamber music with members of the Juilliard, Cleveland and Tokyo String Quartets and prestigious collaborative artists like Benjamin Pasternak and Robert Macdonald.
She has won grants from Peabody Conservatory and from the University of Alabama and will be published by the University of Alabama Press. Snyder was violist of the Omega String Quartet in the summer of 2006, an ensemble in residence at the Lutheran Summer Music Festival, where she also taught viola. She joined the faculty of the Brevard Music Festival in 2007.
Snyder is very active in her community, holding offices in the Alabama State Chapters of MENC and ASTA. She is currently the Immediate Past President of the Alabama Orchestra Association, where she served on the board of the Alabama Music Educator's Association, the state chapter of Music Educator's National Conference. She was born into a musical family and began her serious studies of music at the age of 3. She grew up giving concerts with her family both in the United States and abroad and continues to concertize with her siblings, mother and other extended musical family members on the yearly family New Year's concert in Memphis.
