Julia Glenn

With a deep love for music new and old, Chinese culture and music, and exploring crossroads between music and language, Boston native Julia Glenn savors finding and contributing to unique artistic voices as an international performer of modern and baroque violins. Called “remarkable,” “gripping,” and “a brilliant soloist” by the New York Times, she recently joined the Naumburg-winning Lydian String Quartet and the faculty of Brandeis University after teaching for three years at the Tianjin Juilliard School, where she served as violin and theory faculty and was a member of the Tianjin Juilliard Ensemble.

Glenn has appeared on stages including Alice Tully Hall, Carnegie Hall’s Weill Hall, Sanders Theatre, Jordan Hall, Symphony Hall, the Beijing Recital Hall, Beijing’s National Centre for the Performing Arts, and Shanghai Concert Hall, and collaborated with artists including New York New Music Ensemble, ACRONYM, A Far Cry, Triple Helix, Cantata Profana, and members of the Shanghai, Muir, Ysaÿe, and Juilliard quartets. In January of 2016 she gave the world premiere of Milton Babbitt’s violin concerto to critical acclaim; her article on the work was published in 2022 in Contemporary Music Review. 

Glenn has long been interested in exploring and sharing the widely varied music and culture of China and draws upon her backgrounds in linguistics and Chinese language to open up fruitful avenues in Chinese music theory and performance. Her doctoral dissertation was titled “Hearing in Tone: A Phonetic Approach to the Analysis and Performance of Chinese Contemporary Music.” Juilliard’s 2019 John Erksine Faculty Prize winner and a Fulbright awardee in 2013, she has presented talks and lecture-performances on her work at the Harvard Shanghai Center, Hamburg Hochschule für Musik und Theatre, Harvard University, Shanghai Conservatory, Beijing Central Conservatory, and Juilliard. 

A student of Joseph Lin and Cynthia Roberts, she received her D.M.A. from Juilliard in 2018. In 2013 she graduated with her master’s from New England Conservatory as a student of James Buswell, and in 2012 her bachelor’s in linguistics magna cumlaude from Harvard University. She plays a 2018 Benjamin Ruth as her modern violin and a (baroque-d) 2008 Andrew Ryan as her baroque violin.