JULY 2018

Chilean violist Sergio Muñoz Leiva is an advocate for dialogue, collaboration, and community building, which he realizes in music through his love for chamber music and education.

 

A curious and versatile performer, Dr. Muñoz Leiva is active in chamber music, solo, and orchestral settings. His repertoire spans from early Baroque to music that is fresh off the press, performed on both modern and baroque viola. He has premiered works by Paola Prestini and Nico Muhly, and has collaborated with artists such as Kinan Azmeh, Dinuk Wijeratne, Masaaki Suzuki, Rachel Podger, Monica Huggett, Robert Mealy, Daniel S. Lee, Emi Ferguson, Laurie Smukler, Catherine Cho, Natasha Brofsky, Areta Zhulla, Carol Rodland, Kim Kashkashian, Mikhail Kopelman, Renée Jolles, Ariadne Daskalakis, and Steven Doane.

 

Dr. Muñoz Leiva is a member of the Providence Baroque Orchestra and has performed as a guest artist with A Far Cry, Palaver Strings, Carnegie Hall’s Link Up Orchestra, the United Nations Chamber Music Society, the Princeton Symphony Orchestra, and the Chile Chamber Orchestra. He has appeared in venues such as Jordan Hall and Symphony Hall in Boston; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center, and Carnegie Hall in New York; the Municipal Theater of Santiago in Santiago de Chile; the Guangzhou and Shenzhen Opera Houses in China; the LVR-Landesmuseum in Bonn, Germany; and the Palazzo Ricci in Montepulciano, Italy.

 

His musical mentors are Penelope Knuth, David Holland, Dimitri Murrath, Kim Kashkashian, and Carol Rodland. He is a graduate of the Interlochen Arts Academy and holds degrees from the New England Conservatory, the Eastman School of Music, and The Juilliard School. His research interests include musical analysis, Latin American folk music, and music as a catalyst for community building.

 

Dr. Muñoz Leiva joined the Department of Music of College of the Holy Cross as Interim Director of Chamber Music in September 2022. He also currently serves as Music Theory Instructor at Project STEP in Boston. Previous teaching appointments include serving as Studio Teaching Assistant to Carol Rodland at The Juilliard School, as Instructor of Viola for Non-Majors at the Eastman School of Music and the University of Rochester, and as Teaching Artist at City College Academy of the Arts in New York.

 

As a multilingual citizen of the world, Dr. Muñoz Leiva enjoys the subtleties of language, linguistics, and semantics. When he is not musicking, he can be found in the swimming pool perfecting his butterfly stroke.