Marjorie Bagley enjoys a varied career as performer and pedagogue. In August of 2009, she happily returned to her home state to be Professor of Violin at the University of North Carolina Greensboro. She is one of the concertmasters and teaching faculty at the Brevard Music Festival in the summers, and is Principal Second violin of the ProMusica Chamber Orchestra.

Marjorie was founding first violinist of the Arcata Quartet, a group that enjoyed nearly a decade of concerts around the globe. They collaborated with many great musicians, including members of the Emerson, Tokyo, and American Quartets, and can be heard in recordings on the VOX and New World labels. Concerts took them across North America and Europe, with recitals in Carnegie’s Weill Recital Hall and Wigmore Hall, and a concerto for quartet and orchestra with the Utah Symphony and Keith Lockhart. The quartet spent several years as Quartet in Residence at Utah State University.

Marjorie began teaching as an assistant to Stephen Shipps at the Meadowmount School and the University of Michigan. She has held teaching positions at the Manhattan School of Music Preparatory Division, Utah State University, Ohio University, and Carnegie Mellon. Summer teaching positions have taken her to the Green Mountain Chamber Music Festival, the Perlman Music Program, the International Music Academy Plzen (Czech Republic), and the Brevard Music Festival.

Marjorie is actively involved in playing contemporary works, and has premiered works by many composers, including Joel Puckett, Paul Chihara, Mark Engebretson, Alejandro Rutty, Mark Philips, Judith Shatin, and David Noon. In contrast, she has also performed with the Berkshire Bach Society since 1995 under the direction of Kenneth Cooper. She and Cooper recently published a version of Mozart’s Fantasie in C for violin and piano (originally for piano with an incomplete violin part surviving) for the International Music Company.

She has performed as soloist with the Little Orchestra Society in Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall, with the North Carolina Symphony, the Asheville and Salisbury Symphonies (NC), the Idaho Falls Symphony, the Chisinau Philharmonic (Moldova), the ProMusica Chamber Orchestra, the University of Michigan Symphony, and the Wind Ensembles at Ohio University, UNCG, and the University of Michigan.

Her teachers included Stephen Shipps (University of Michigan, B.M.), Patinka Kopec, and Pinchas Zukerman (Manhattan School of Music, M.M.) When she’s not performing, Marjorie enjoys cooking, gardening, and hiking with her husband, physics professor Ian Beatty, and their daughter, Eleanor.