Diego Vásquez

Diego Vásquez is an interdisciplinary musician who loves to play the clarinet and twerk. He is Principal Clarinet of both the Berkshire Opera Festival and Cayuga Chamber Orchestra and is currently serving on the faculties of Ithaca College and Cornell University. His debut EP, “Dr Diego,” was released in 2022 from the seeds of classic deep house, disco, chiptunes and baroque organ music. He is currently working on an audio/visual album with composer Mark Olivieri.

Much of Vásquez’s work involves dance. In 2022 he worked with the Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra and the Lucerne Theater in the site-specific production “STYX Tour: A Rendezvous with the Dead.” For the 2017–2018 season, Vásquez served as dancer/mime soloist in Karlheinz Stockhausen’s INORI, with performances at the Luzern KKL and the Berlin Philharmonie, conducted by Péter Eötvös. In 2019, Diego performed Stockhausen’s KLANG in Montreal and UVERSA at Zelyonka Space Up in Kyiv, Ukraine’s largest modern dance festival. He is scheduled to perform INORI with the New Westphalian Philharmonic in Essen, Germany in October 2026. At Ithaca College, Diego developed The Choreography of Music, a course exploring interdisciplinary performance history and practice.

 

Vásquez completed his Doctor of Musical Arts at The Hartt School with a dissertation entitled “The Clarinet Writing in Wagner’s Parsifal as Synthesis of the Wagner/Nietzsche Relationship.” He holds a Master of Music from Mannes College, The New School. He has studied music history with Ira Braus and clarinet with Ayako Oshima and Charles Neidich. Vásquez plays on clarinets made in Bamberg, Germany by Schwenk & Seggelke. You can find him at www.diegocl.com.

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