String and Orchestral Studies

If you played in your high school orchestra and would like to continue in college, music major or not, we have the orchestra for you at UCM. UCM also has chamber music opportunities for string students in one of our scholarship string quartets.

Our full symphony performs at least two concerts a semester, including our Concerto and Aria Competition Winners' Concert, in which the winner of our Concerto and Aria Competition perform their solo with the orchestra. Our symphony orchestra performs standard orchestral repertoire as well as 20th and 21st-century works. Recent works include Tchaikovsky's 6th Symphony, "Pathetique;" Dvorak's 8th Symphony; the Academic Festival Overture of Brahms; and Howard Hanson's 5th Symphony, "Sinfonia Sacra."

As a string player at UCM you have the opportunity to perform in master classes with some of the world's best musicians. Recent master classes have been led by members of the Kansas City Symphony; Routa Kroumovitch, a student of David Oistrakh and former co-concertmaster of the National Symphony of Chile; and David and Eric Halen. David Halen is concertmaster of the St. Louis Symphony and Eric is co-concertmaster of the Houston Symphony. Both are UCM alumni.