Equally at home with a classical score or a fiddle tune, violinist Liesl Schoenberger Doty has built a career that moves fluidly between the concert hall and the jam session. Praised for her “magnetic presence,” she has performed throughout North America and Europe in venues including Carnegie Hall’s Stern Auditorium, Weill Recital Hall, and Zankel Hall, Vienna’s Musikverein, the Kennedy Center, and the Kravis Center.
Originally from Cape Girardeau, Missouri, Liesl has appeared as a soloist with orchestras across the United States and as a recitalist and chamber musician at festivals and concert series including Yellow Barn, the Skaneateles Festival, Ottawa Chamberfest, the Norfolk and Sarasota Music Festivals, New Music New Haven, Chamber Music at Yale, the Orford Centre d’Arts, the Sommerakademie Mozarteum in Salzburg, and Ferme de Villefavard in France. She currently serves as Concertmaster of the Orchestra of Northern New York, where she also contributes to artistic programming.
Liesl’s musical life has never been confined to a single tradition. As a fiddler and crossover artist, she has released three commercial albums in collaboration with Nashville musicians Buddy Spicher and David Grier and has appeared as a guest artist at the Grand Ole Opry. Since 2009, she has toured nationally as a featured soloist with composer and pianist Eric Genuis.
In 2012, Liesl became a “Crier” with Boston’s Grammy-nominated chamber orchestra A Far Cry. During nearly a decade with the ensemble, she toured and recorded extensively while serving alongside the other Criers as a co-artistic director, sharing responsibility for the artistic and organizational life of the conductorless orchestra. She continues her association with A Far Cry as a Crier Emeritus.
Collaboration remains central to Liesl’s musical life. With her husband, bassist and founding A Far Cry member Karl Doty, she performs as The Dotys, a classical and crossover duo whose work brings together chamber music, fiddle traditions, original tunes, and their own arrangements. Their music reflects a shared belief that the boundaries between musical traditions can be considerably more porous—and that the possibilities are much more joyful that way.
Liesl is Associate Professor of Violin at The Crane School of Music at SUNY Potsdam, where she teaches applied violin, chamber music, and violin pedagogy and coaches the violin section of the Crane Symphony Orchestra. Central to her approach is teaching students how to learn well: how to listen critically, understand their own playing, solve problems in the practice room, and develop the technical and musical tools to make their own artistic decisions. She is deeply invested in building independent, curious musicians who take ownership of their growth while learning generously alongside one another.
Liesl holds Bachelor and Master of Music degrees from Indiana University, where she studied with Mimi Zweig and Mauricio Fuks, and an Artist Diploma from the Yale School of Music, where she studied with Ani Kavafian. She completed the academic and performance requirements for doctoral study at the New England Conservatory, where she served as teaching assistant to Lucy Chapman, before stepping away to focus on a rapidly growing performance and teaching career. Her previous faculty appointments include Dartmouth College, the University of New Hampshire, Saint Anselm College, and Southeast Missouri State University.
She performs on a 1919 Carl Becker violin.
