American cellist Seth Parker Woods has been promoted to the Robert Mann Chair in Strings and Chamber Music at the Los Angeles-based USC Thornton School of Music
Cellist Seth Parker Woods; photo by Ben Gibbs
The Grammy Award-nominated American cellist Seth Parker Woods has been appointed to the Robert Mann Chair in Strings and Chamber Music at the University of Southern California’s Thornton School of Music in Los Angeles.
Woods joined the USC Thornton faculty in 2022 as assistant professor of practice in string chamber music and cello. His promotion to the endowed Robert Mann Chair follows a season of international engagements, including additional performances of Difficult Grace, Woods’ multimedia music theatre collaboration with choreographer/dancer Roderick George (the recording of which was nominated for the Classical Instrumental Solo category in the 2024 Grammy Awards).
'Professor Woods embodies the forward-looking artist and musician that the Thornton School of Music aims to cultivate in its students', said Jason King, Dean of the USC Thornton School of Music, in an announcement of the promotion.
The honour came ‘as a total surprise,’ Woods said in a public post on his Facebook page. ’I love my school, department and colleagues and am so excited to see where we continue going and the changes we make for the future. I first met the late Bobby Mann (founding violinist of the Juilliard Quartet and long time Juilliard faculty member) many moons ago when I was a high school student and was forever in awe of his musicianship and the way he could pull musical lines out of budding musicians’.
A passionate new music advocate and performance installation maker, Seth Parker Woods was born in Houston in 1984 and studied at Brooklyn College, the Musik-Akademie Basel and the University of Huddersfield, from which he earned his doctorate with a focus on sound mimesis, choreographic archiving and embodied movement related to performance.
In recent years, Woods has appeared in concert at the Royal Albert Hall – BBC Proms, Aspen Music Festival, the Isabella Gardner Museum, The Wallis Annenberg Center, Das Haus (Brussels) and Musée d’art Moderne et Contemporain (Strasbourg), among many other venues. He received the 2023 Pew Grant for the Arts with Barbara Earl Thomas, the 2023 Seattle Symphony Silver Gala Honoree and the 2021 Chamber Music America Visionary Award.
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