May 25, 2005—Faculty appointments at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music for the 2005-2006 academic year announced recently by Dean of the Conservatory David H. Stull include new members of the string and historical performance divisions. Violist Karen Ritscher joins Peter Slowik on the viola faculty as associate professor of viola, and early music specialist Webb Wiggins, a long-time faculty member of the Oberlin Baroque Performance Institute, is now associate professor of harpsichord.

Karen Ritscher, Oberlin's new associate professor of viola, is a serious proponent of new music. Ritscher has commissioned and premiered works by many composers, among them Bruce Adolphe, Linda Bouchard, Wendy Mae Chambers, Bright Sheng, Alice Shields, and Chen Yi. A member of the Manhattan-based Azure Ensemble, a new music group, she has also been a member of the Aureus Piano Quartet. Her chamber music performances include those with James Oliver Buswell IV, Paul Katz, Ani Kavafian, and Nathaniel Rosen.

Ritscher's other performance experiences include principal violist for the Dallas Opera and the Houston Grand Opera, assistant principal violist for the American Composers Orchestra, and more than 15 years with both the Orchestra of St. Luke's and the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra.

Her music making includes appointments at the Aspen Music Festival, the Beijing International Music Festival and Academy, the Bowdoin Music Festival, the Heifetz International Summer Institute, and the Musicorda Summer Music Festival. She has also performed with the New York Philharmonic and the Houston Symphony.

Since 2002, Ritscher has served on the faculty of the Karen Tuttle Coordination Workshop, an annual summer workshop that explores Tuttle's physical and emotional approach to the viola. Ritscher has been a featured panelist and performer at the International Viola Congress, a featured panelist at the American String Teachers Association, and has presented master classes in Seoul, Korea, the Cleveland Institute of Music, the New England Conservatory of Music, and the Hartt School of Music, among others. Besides her teaching duties, Ritscher is also the education editor for the Journal of the American Viola Society and author of the column "In the Studio." She was the string consultant for Madeline Bruser's The Art of Practicing: A Guide to Making Music from the Heart, published by Bell Tower Press in 1997, and served as a board member of the American Viola Society from 1996 to 2002. Ritscher earned both a bachelor of music degree, with distinction, and a master of music degree from the Eastman School of Music, where she studied viola with Martha Strongin Katz and Francis Tursi. Additional studies include those with Karen Tuttle. Ritscher's chamber music teachers include Donald Weilerstein, Paul Katz, and Aldo Parisot.

With specializations in harpsichord, continuo, and instrumental and vocal chamber music, Oberlin's new Associate Professor of Harpsichord Webb Wiggins, who was visiting professor of harpsichord at Oberlin during the 1993-1994 academic year, has been a faculty member of the Oberlin Baroque Performance Institute, America's premiere summer workshop for baroque instruments and voice, since 1985, and served in a similar capacity for the Amherst Early Music Institute in Massachusetts. Wiggins coordinated the Early Music Program at the Peabody Conservatory of Music at the Johns Hopkins University, where he was a member of the faculty from 1986 until 2005, and where he served as musical director of baroque operas in the Peabody opera department. He has also taught harpsichord at Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania, and George Mason University, and was assistant to the director of the chamber music program at the Smithsonian Institution from 1985 to 1989, where he maintains an active performance and teaching relationship.

Wiggins has performed extensively throughout the United States, the Netherlands, Taiwan and New Zealand as a soloist and with such ensembles as Apollo's Fire, Hesperus, Pomerium, the Smithsonian Chamber Orchestra, the Baltimore Consort, the Baltimore Chamber Orchestra, the Folger Consort, Tempesta di Mare, the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, the National Symphony Orchestra, and the Philadelphia Classical Orchestra.

He earned a bachelor of music degree from Stetson University in 1967 and a master of music degree from the Eastman School of Music in 1968. He also studied at the Sweelinck Conservatory in Amsterdam.

The Oberlin Conservatory of Music, founded in 1865 and situated within the intellectual vitality of Oberlin College since 1867, is the oldest continuously operating conservatory in the United States. Renowned internationally as a professional music school of the highest caliber and pronounced a "national treasure" by the Washington Post, Oberlin's alumni have gone on to achieve illustrious careers in all aspects of the serious music world. Many of them have attained stature as solo performers, composers, and conductors, among them Jennifer Koh, Steven Isserlis, Denyce Graves, Franco Farina, Lisa Saffer, George Walker, Christopher Rouse, David Zinman, and Robert Spano. All of the members of the contemporary music ensembles eighth blackbird and the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) are Oberlin graduates, and members of the Miró, Pacifica, Juilliard, and Fry Street quartets, among others, include Oberlin alumni, who also can be found in major orchestras and opera companies throughout the world.