Brent Wissick

Professor

Brent Wissick (Professor) has taught cello, chamber music, and viola da gamba at UNC since 1982. Over a long career, he has played concerts throughout North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia with groups including American Bach Soloists, Atlanta Baroque Orchestra, Ensemble Chanterelle, Atlanta Symphony, Boston Early Music Festival, Folger Consort, Smithsonian Chamber Players, Concert Royal, Dallas Bach Society, Parthenia and Wroclaw Baroque in Poland. Recordings can be heard on the Albany, Centaur, Erato, Koch, and Acis labels among others; three of them Grammy-nominated. His online article “The Cello Music of Bononcini” can be viewed in the peer-reviewed Journal of Seventeenth-Century Music and several of his teaching videos are posted on the website of the Viola da Gamba Society of America website. He served as President of that group from 2000-04, chaired the Pan-Pacific Gathering in Hawaii in 2007, and was awarded Lifetime Membership in 2020. His article about the “Coprario Six-Part Pieces” will be published in the VdGSA Journal in 2021.

In addition to teaching cello and coaching chamber music at UNC, he directs the Baroque Ensemble, which frequently collaborates with UNC Opera; and runs the Viol Consort. He also teaches a First-Year Seminar on the Physics of Music with Laurie McNeil of the Physics faculty, a course they developed in 1999 and have taught regularly since. He was Associate Chair for PCME from 2017-20, served as Kenan Music Scholars mentor at the start of the program; and was String Area Chair for many years.

His current research and performance interests include 19thcentury music with period instruments, 17th-century music for viols and voices; and cello music of Britten. A graduate of the Crane School of Music at Potsdam College in New York (1976), he received his MM in cello from Penn State in 1978 and was awarded an Alum Award in 2014. Additional studies were with John Hsu at Cornell and as an NEH Fellow at Harvard in the 1993 Beethoven Quartet Seminar. His lectures and master class teaching have taken him to colleges and universities on four continents including four summers at Tokai University in Japan, and he served as an adjudicator in the 2017 Aiqin Cup Cello Competition sponsored by Central Conservatory Beijing.