Violinist Philip Setzer is a founding member of the Emerson String Quartet, which has received nine Grammy Awards, three Gramophone Awards, and the coveted Avery Fisher Prize, and has performed cycles of the complete Beethoven, Bartók, and Shostakovich string quartets in the world’s musical capitals, from New York to Vienna. The Noise of Time, a groundbreaking theater collaboration between the Emerson Quartet and Simon McBurney—about the life of Shostakovich—was based on an original idea of Mr. Setzer’s.

As a soloist, he has appeared on several occasions with The Cleveland Orchestra, with the Aspen Chamber Orchestra, and also with the National, Memphis, New Mexico, Puerto Rico, Omaha, and Anchorage Symphonies. In 1976, Philip Setzer won a bronze medal at the Queen Elisabeth International Competition in Brussels.  He has also participated in the Marlboro Music Festival.

Mr. Setzer is a tenured Professor of Violin and Chamber Music at Stony Brook University and has given master classes at schools around the world. He has been a regular faculty member of the Isaac Stern Chamber Music Workshops at Carnegie Hall and the Jerusalem Music Center. His article about those workshops appeared in The New York Times on the occasion of Isaac Stern’s 80th birthday celebration in 2001.

Mr. Setzer studied violin with Josef Gingold and Rafael Druian, at The Juilliard School with Oscar Shumsky, and also studied chamber music with Robert Mann and Felix Galimir.