Vicki Richards

Vicki Richards is a violinist, improviser, composer and educator whose professional career spans more than four decades. Her musical roots and training are in traditional North Indian raga, classical European music and electric fusion. She began playing professionally with an orchestra while also playing electric avant-garde fusion.

Her website says she began playing in her public school's instrumental program at nine, encouraged by her musical father, and decided at fourteen that music was her calling. In 1976 she commissioned a custom-built solid-body electric violin. In 1979 she began studying Hindustani music in Banaras, India, as a disciple of Pt. Amarnath Mishra, and of violinist Dr. N. Rajam and Pandit Sharda Sahai. Grants from the American Institute of Indian Studies and the Smithsonian Institution supported her studies in India, and in 1986 she toured for the Festival of India as a representative of the USA.

She made her Carnegie Recital Hall debut with an Indian raga program in 1983. Her playing joins bowing and articulation from Western classical training, vocal-style glissandos from North Indian classical music, and hand-drum rhythms. She studied at the University of Miami's Frost School of Music on a full scholarship. There she worked with Robert Thomas Jr. and Amitava Chatterjee in the ensemble Amazone, which led to her first solo recording, Parting the Waters. For more than ten years she also played with symphony orchestras in New York City, Rhode Island, Switzerland and Miami.

She has performed with Layne Redmond, Jorge Alfano and tabla player Jeff Deen, at concert halls, universities, ashrams, temples and health support centers. She has also played at Kripalu and The Yoga Farm. She has given lecture demonstrations to university string, composition and percussion departments, and has presented at the ASTA National Conference and Mark O'Connor's String Conference. For 25 years she taught Suzuki and traditional classical violin in her private studios in the Miami area.