Norfolk Chamber Music Festival Yale Summer School of Music

Watkins grew up in a house filled with music. His father was an amateur violist while his mother, a school teacher, loved to sing. “Dad wanted me to learn violin so he could have more of a regular string quartet,” Watkins says. It was not to be. “I found the cellist of his friends so cool,” Watkins says, saying he wore a leather jacket and sometimes smoked while he played. “He looked like a British version of someone who might have stepped off the set of Starsky and Hutch.”

The University of Maryland has awarded its 2020 Graduate String Quartet Fellowship to the Thalea String Quartet (NCMF '19)

Violinist and composer to lead conversations on the role of art and race