Rachel Vetter Huang

Rachel Vetter Huang (born November 9, 1958) is a classical violinist, recording artist and Adjunct Professor in Music at Scripps College. She is also a published scholar in general music, African-American music and jazz. Huang has performed in the U.S.A., China, Austria, Italy, Hungary, Scotland and other European countries.
Education
Rachel Vetter Huang was born in Edmonton, Canada, and spent her childhood in Chicago, Illinois, and Lexington, Massachusetts, where she studied violin with the Polish-American violinist Roman Totenberg, Professor of Music at Boston University. She spent summers at the Meadowmount School of Music as a pupil of Ivan Galamian. At 16, Huang received a major scholarship to Radcliffe College, Harvard University; while there she studied with noted American violin pedagogue Dorothy DeLay. During that time, Huang also attended the Aspen Music Festival and School and Tanglewood Music Festival on major scholarships. After graduating from Harvard, Huang did postbaccalaureate work at Brandeis University with Robert Koff, original second violinist of the Juilliard String Quartet. She later took an M.M. in violin performance at the Stony Brook University, and finished with a Doctor of Musical Arts in violin under the guidance of Isidore Cohen and Lazar Gosman, former concertmaster of the Leningrad Philharmonic.
Professional career
Rachel Huang is violinist of the Mei Duo, the Gold Coast Trio and the Euphoria Quartet, resident quartet of the Claremont Colleges. She has performed as concerto soloist with the Boston Pops Orchestra, the Concord Symphony Orchestra, the Albuquerque Philharmonic, the Lake Tahoe Festival Orchestra and others. Prior to faculty appointment in Music at Scripps College, Huang served as violin professor at the Petrie School of Music at Converse College, the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and Fort Lewis College. She has been a guest artist at the University of California, Davis, San Francisco State University, New Mexico State University, New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology and was an American representative at the Respighi Festival in Citta de Castello, Italy, the Classical Music Festival in Eisenstadt, Austria, and the Arts College, Xiamen University, People's Republic of China. She has performed on radio broadcasts from WQXR-FM New York, WGBH-FM Boston and on South Carolina, North Carolina, Colorado and California public television and radio networks.
Huang's article on Billie Holiday's rhythmic expressivity was reviewed by the Chronicle of Higher Education and was published by the Institute of Jazz Studies of Rutgers University. She also authored four entries in the Encyclopedia of Music in the Twentieth Century, published by M.E. Sharpe (London). In recognition of her outstanding scholarship in jazz and Billie Holiday in particular, she was interviewed for "Billie and Me", an acclaimed 6-part radio series for BBC Radio 2, which was later commissioned as a critically acclaimed stage performance at London's Barbican Centre in 2004.
Awards and honors
Recipient of National Endowment for the Arts grants towards production of chamber music festivals in New York and Colorado, Huang was chosen to participate in a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar, "JAZZ: A Comparative View" at Yale University, directed by John F. Szwed, Musser Professor of Anthropology and African American Studies. She has given numerous presentations on violin-piano duo repertoire as the chamber music at state and national conventions of the Music Teachers National Association and the College Music Society, and was a featured artist performer at the 1994 World Conference of the International Society for Music Education in Tampa, Florida.
Works and publications
African-American music
*"The Suite for Violin and Piano: William Grant Still and the Harlem Renaissance", Violin Society of America Journal, Vol. 24 No. 3, 1996
Jazz studies
* "Towards an Understanding of Rhythmic Expressivity: Billie Holiday's Rubato", co-author Hao Huang, Annual Review of Jazz Studies, Vol. 7, 1994-95 (Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers University)
General music studies
* Entries (Ernest Ansermet, Pablo Casals, Fritz Kreisler, Billie Holiday), in Encyclopedia of Music in the Twentieth Century, M.E. Sharpe, London, 1998
* "New Strategies for Introduction to Music Courses: Cross-cultural and Cross-tradition Comparison and Examination", Art & Academe: A Journal in the Humanities and Sciences in the Education of Artists, Vol. 9, No. 1, Fall 1996 (School of the Visual Arts, NYC), 1997
Recordings
* THE GOLD COAST TRIO "live at Mondavi Center" (Agnelli CD-2) 2006
* THE MEI DUO "live", American Romantics (VSA CD-2000-1) 2001

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