Judy Johns

Eric Schultz is an American clarinetist equally in demand as a soloist, chamber musician, and interpreter of new music. He maintains an active concerto schedule performing with orchestras across the world and can be seen and heard from Netflix to National Public Radio. Hailed a “mastermind” in the Myrtle Beach Herald and a “pathfinder” by iconic composer Valerie Coleman, Schultz was selected as a quarterfinalist for the 2025 GRAMMY® Music Educator of the Year Award.

An uncompromising advocate for the music of our time whose unique voice on the clarinet has inspired many of today’s finest composers, Schultz is known for his liquid, soulful tone quality and singular abilities on the instrument, including an unrivaled five-octave range, limitless facility of technique, and improvisations that span many dialects. Dubbed a “superstar muse” by celebrated composer Amanda Harberg, Schultz has commissioned and/or premiered the music of Valerie Coleman, Leila Adu-Gilmore, Jonathan Bailey Holland, David Sanford, Mary Watkins, Liliya Ugay, Chiayu Hsu, Tony Solitro, Johanny Navarro, Armando Bayolo, Carlos Carrillo, Iván Enrique Rodríguez, and many more. Pulitzer-prize winning composer John Corigliano declared Schultz’s performance of his iconic clarinet concerto in New York City “a sensation,” while critic Jeffrey Williams praised his “super-virtuosity” and described the performance as “an adrenaline rush, bursting with drama and relentless momentum” (NYC Review).

Schultz currently serves as Assistant Professor of Music at Coastal Carolina University, where he is coordinator of the woodwind area and director of the Center for Inclusive Excellence. As a founding faculty of the center, he coined the phrase and created The [Represent]atoire Project, a play on the words repertoire and representation. The project advocates for including a diversity of composers in collegiate music curricula by intensely focusing on living American composers. Schultz completed his Doctor of Musical Arts degree in clarinet performance at Stony Brook University. As a Buffet Crampon performing artist, he performs exclusively on Buffet Crampon clarinets. 

@ericschultzclarinet

News

October 17, 2024

The Inside Story: Eric Schultz and POLYGLOT

Albums

Polyglot

Release Date: October 4, 2024
Catalog Number: NV6655
21st Century
Romantic
Chamber
Cello
Clarinet
Piano
Eric Schultz’s masterful clarinet playing speaks in new and known tongues on POLYGLOT, a concept album celebrating music as a language of cultural identity and the self. A strong advocate of living composers, Schultz opens with an engrossing performance of Iván Enrique Rodríguez’s Sonata Santera, exploring the development and evolution of three Caribbean Santeria rituals. Schultz captures the enchanting, mystical nature of the rituals between the rhythmic, driving movements, occasionally accompanied by percussive elements.  Schultz follows with Críptico no. 9: DAVЯTHAN, an interpretive piece that centralizes language and text-setting at the core of its composition. Shortly followed is Johnny Navarro’s romantic Danzón, a nostalgic work punctuated by fleeting moments of sensuality. The same intimacy is carried into Chiayu Hsu’s Summer Night in a Deep Valley, showcasing meditative episodes on the natural beauty expressed in Guo Xi’s Chinese landscape paintings. Likewise, Gabriel Bouche Caro’s Escenas explores a meditation on self-identity and its existence as a product of culture, the clarinet never languishing in melancholic passages, but always remaining reflective and curious. POLYGLOT culminates with the Brahms Trio, Op. 114, a composition inspired by the clarinet playing of friend Richard Mühlfeld, an inspiration so strong it served to pull the composer from retirement. To Schultz, a quarterfinalist for the 2025 GRAMMY® Music Educator of the Year, music is a hallmark of metamorphosis that drives cultural change across history, the performer and composer working in tandem to create something inspired and new — speaking each other’s language, you might say.