Fitz Gary
Guest Musician
Violist Fitz Gary has already begun transforming the role of the musician in our society. An active performer and social activist, in 2012 he founded Music Feeds Us, a concert series designed to promote classical music and hunger relief, which has raised over 140,000 meals to date for food banks in Virginia. A graduate of The Juilliard School and the Cleveland Institute of Music, Fitz studied with Heidi Castleman, Hsin-Yun Huang, and Jeffrey Irvine.
Fitz is a native of Charlottesville, Virginia, and has performed across the United States, Europe, and in Asia in such venues as New York’s Carnegie Hall and Avery Fisher Hall, London’s Royal Albert Hall, Vienna’s Konzerthaus, and Japan’s Suntory Hall. Fitz’s passion for chamber music has led to studies with members of the Artemis, Cleveland, Juilliard, Jupiter, Keller, Miró, and Takács Quartets. As a teaching artist, Fitz has been on faculty at the Bay View Music Festival, the Hampton Roads Chamber Players, taught in the Charlottesville High School Orchestra program as the Boyd Tinsley String Mentor, and given masterclasses and presentations to students of all ages.
Selected as a 2013-2014 Fulbright Scholar, Fitz studied with Barbara Westphal at the Lübeck Musikhochschule in Germany. The school subsequently awarded him the 2014-2015 DAAD prize for an outstanding international student, as well as his second masters degree. While in Germany, Fitz completed the Akademie with the Grammy-Award-winning NDR Sinfonieorchester (Elbphilharmonie) in Hamburg.
Currently, Fitz is a freelance musician based in Norfolk, Virginia. He is president of the Feldman Chamber Music Society, and serves as a Clinician Ambassador for D’Addario Orchestral.