Meet Our Musicians: Cameron Raecke, Violist

Cameron Marc Raecke, violist, has been a core member of the Mid-Atlantic Symphony Orchestra for several years and is in high demand as a performer by orchestras and chamber ensembles alike. His musical travels have taken him to many places: Singapore, Canada, Mexico, even New Jersey. He is the Assistant Principal Violist of the Allentown Symphony Orchestra in Pennsylvania and a frequent guest principal violist for the Londontowne Symphony Orchestra in Maryland, and he has performed with many other orchestras, such as the Baltimore, Fort Worth, Singapore, and Annapolis Symphonies. For his collegiate education, Mr. Raecke attended the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore and the University of Texas at Arlington. At the latter institution, he was a founding member of Bratsche con Brio, the resident all-viola ensemble that earned great acclaim during its tour in the Monterrey, Mexico, area and at the 27th International Viola Congress in Canada. His music festival education includes sessions at the Colorado College Summer Music Festival, the Killington Music Festival in Vermont, and the Aspen Music Festival in Colorado with a coveted three-year orchestral fellowship. More recently, Mr. Raecke is a founding member of the Movement in Music Ensemble, an innovative conductorless chamber orchestra founded in 2021 that presents memorized, choreographed musical performances. In addition to his broad orchestral and chamber music career, Mr. Raecke has an expansive history of performing new and experimental music, having participated in many world premiere performances, from Allentown’s New Music Chamber Series — at which, in April 2022, he premeired ten new works in the same concert — to Baltimore’s High Zero Festival, the premier East Coast festival of improvised experimental music. He was an active member of his school’s New Music Ensemble when he was an undergraduate in Texas, and he has performed at Baltimore’s Red Room — a lynchpin of experimental music in the Mid-Atlantic region — and in concerts of new music at ArtScape, the largest free arts festival in the United States. Mr. Raecke — unsatisfied with only performing — runs a private teaching studio of both viola and violin students, some of whom have attended such presitigious institutions as the summer festival at the Brevard Music Center and Tanglewood. In its Spring 2022 issue, the Journal of the American Viola Society published Mr. Raecke’s paper, “The Three Laws of Sound Production,” in which he provides a comprehensive explanation of the basic mechanics of sound production for bowed string instruments.