Cello Chat with Host Dr. Benjamin Whitcomb and guest Linda Jennings
About the Episode
In today's Cello Chat, we talked with Linda Jennings!
Meet the Guest
Linda Jennings is associate professor of Cello at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, where she also directs the IUP Cello Choir and the IUP String Project. Jennings received her bachelor of music in cello performance at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She also holds a master of music in cello performance from the University of Southern California and a doctorate of music from the University of Texas at Austin. She has studied with cellists Geraldine Jennings, Janet Grieve, Parry Karp, Eleonore Schoenfeld, Uri Vardi, and Phyllis Young. Jennings studied bass with David Neubert.
Jennings is an active solo, chamber, and orchestra performer. She has played in orchestras throughout Texas, the Midwest, and Alaska and served as principal cellist for the Fairbanks Symphony Orchestra, the Arctic Chamber Orchestra, and the Chamber Orchestra of the Alleghenies. In summer 2002 she was invited to serve as guest principal cellist of the Bangkok Symphony Orchestra in Thailand for the 70th birthday celebration of Thailand's Queen Sirikit.
She has also appeared as soloist and chamber musician in concerts and festivals in the United States, Mexico, France, Austria, Norway, Thailand, Indonesia, and Haiti. Currently, Jennings is a member of the Arcadia Trio and the Litton String Quartet, IUP's faculty string quartet-in-residence. Jennings has also been invited to present master classes nationally in Wisconsin, Texas, North Carolina, Georgia, and Oklahoma as well as internationally in Croatia, Thailand, and Haiti.
In addition to her performing and teaching career, Jennings is a strong proponent of string music education. From 1997 to 1999, she served as the director of the prestigious UT String Project, an internationally acclaimed teacher-training program for undergraduate and graduate students at the University of Texas at Austin. Currently, she directs a similar program, the IUP String Project, which she founded in 2004. The IUP String Project provides a comprehensive hands-on teacher string pedagogy program for IUP string majors and minors. In recent years, Jennings has been invited to teach and provide pedagogy training for music teachers in Haiti and Thailand. In 2014 she served as artistic director and guest artist for the Bangkok Symphony Orchestra Cello Festival and Chiang Rai Youth Orchestra Cello Festival, the first festival of this kind in Thailand.
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