festival director and cofounder
violin and viola
Matt Pickart is Director and Co-founder of Clazz International Music Festival in Arcidosso, Italy, and Assistant Professor of Music at Webster University in Saint Louis, where he serves as Director of Chamber Music and teaches violin, viola, improvisation, and music entrepreneurship. He has the distinct honor and privilege of having performed at both Jazz at Lincoln Center and Carnegie Music Hall’s Weill Recital Hall. Other career highlights include performances with The Who, Barry Manilow on tour, The Vogues as concertmaster, and as principal violist for Bernadette Peters and the Trans-Siberian Orchestra. As a soloist, he has appeared with orchestras in the USA, Canada, Italy, and the Netherlands. in 2018 he was named an honorary artist of the Global Music Partnership.
In addition to classical music, Pickart has performed and recorded in multiple genres including jazz, blues, bluegrass, choro, mariachi, punk, folk, rock, tango, hip hop, klezmer, flamenco, country, indie rock, and celtic. He strongly believes that it’s important for all musicians to be diverse and to know how to improvise and navigate in different styles of music. As one of his favorite composers, Duke Ellington said, “there are simply two kinds of music, good music, and the other kind.” Outside of his classical playing, he has worked extensively in jazz. He was the violinist and vocalist of the Hot Club of Pittsburgh and a founding member of the Pittsburgh classical/jazz project, the Groove Aesthetic and genre-bending group, the Matt Murchison Mutiny. He has also been critically acclaimed for his performances throughout Germany with the Swingadje Ensemble and the Premier Swingtett. In 2013, Mr. Pickart was a featured artist at Jazzstadt Stuttgart. He has performed alongside Grammy-nominated pianist Robert Rodriguez, Grammy award-winning saxophonist Eric Marienthal, and “the greatest living exponent of the electric violin” Tracy Silverman (BBC Radio.) Pickart currently plays as lead violinist of Mariachi Saint Louis and has also recently performed with classical-jazz fusion group Bach to the Future, St. Louis’s klezmer band, Klezundheit, and will be premiering a new tango band in 2022.
Mr. Pickart is lucky to count some of the great luminaries of the music world, among his teachers, such as Sidney Harth (legendary American concertmaster); Yuri Gandelsman (former principal violist of Israel Philharmonic); and Rodney Whitaker (former bassist of Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra.) Other former teachers include Walter Verdehr, Charles Stegeman, Tyrone Greive, Eugene Purdue, Alison Jewer, and Tom Moore on violin; and Marylène Gingras-Roy on viola. He has taken additional lessons with Noah Bendix-Balgley, Evan Price, Choong-Jin Chang, Charles Pikler, and Jacques Israelievitch among others; and has played in masterclasses for a wide variety of artists including Midori, Joan Tower, and Christian Howes.
Prior to coming to Webster University, he served on the faculty of Beloit College, Michigan State University Community Music School, Duquesne University’s City Music Center, and University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Summer Music Clinic among numerous other programs. He is also currently on the faculty of Webster University’s Community Music School, and the Missouri Chamber Music Festival Adult Chamber Music Intensive. Prof. Pickart is in demand as a clinician, adjudicator, hosting talks on music entrepreneurship; and as a special guest for string masterclasses, in the classical canon, improvisation, jazz, and other styles. His students have gone on to attend prestigious institutions on scholarship such as Belmont University, Berklee College of Music, and the New England Conservatory. As a testament to his pedagogy, several of his former students, have entered the profession in multiple styles, teaching and playing.