Amelia Chan

violinist

Amelia Chan is currently concertmaster of the City Chamber Orchestra of Hong Kong (CCOHK).

She came to this position from her tenure as concertmaster of the West Virginia Symphony Orchestra (US). An experienced leader, Amelia has served in the concertmaster chair under acclaimed conductors such as Sir Neville Marriner, Michael Tilson Thomas, Manfred Huss, Sergiu Commissiona, Anton Coppola, Zdeněk Mácal, Jorge Mester, Julius Rudel, and Gerard Schwarz. She has also performed with the New York Philharmonic extensively. As a chamber musician, Amelia has served as first violinist of the Montclaire String Quartet, and has collaborated with guitarist Sharon Isbin, accordionist Richard Galliano, violinist Lara St. John, the Ying Quartet, members of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Jupiter Symphony Chamber Players (NYC), among others. She has appeared as soloist with orchestras including the West Virginia Symphony, the International Virtuosi Orchestra on tour in Central America, the New Amsterdam Symphony Orchestra (NYC), the Brooklyn Symphony Orchestra (NYC), and the City Chamber Orchestra of Hong Kong. She has shared the stage as co-soloist with acclaimed flutist Sir James Galway, and frequently acts as director for the City Chamber Orchestra. She has performed at the Costa Rica Music Festival, the Guatemala Music Festival, Cooperstown Chamber Music Festival in New York and the Pacific Music Festival (Japan).

Amelia has been heard on WQXR, New York; WQED, Pittsburgh; West Virginia Public Broadcasting; BBC Radio Scotland, Scotland; and RTHK Radio 4, Hong Kong.

As an educator, Amelia approaches the teaching of technique through the lens of whole-body biomechanics, and on the principle that techniques of playing an instrument need to be relational to the body, and to how it moves, instead of relying on a static one-size-fits-all method. She believes in a focused and deep education that goes beyond rote training, where the student learns discernment and critical thinking, while sifting through the layers of intellect needed to decipher the depths of the musical art, to get to the natural, joyful simplicity of music-making.

Amelia holds undergraduate, graduate, and post-graduate degrees from the Mannes College of Music and Manhattan School of Music (NY). She began her violin studies in the junior school at the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts. Her major teachers included Thomas Wang, Alice Waten, Albert Markov, Shirley Givens, Lisa Kim, Yoko Takebe, Sheryl Staples, Glenn Dicterow, and double-bassist Julius Levine.

For more information on Amelia, please go to her Instagram page at https://www.instagram.com/ameliachanviolin/ 

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"Concertmaster Amelia Chan in particular played with passion, acting as the vibrant soul of the ensemble.” South China Morning Post 

“…gutsy solo violin throughout [by] concertmaster Amelia Chan…” theprickle.org

Intervals in Music

May 11, 2024  /  Amelia Chan

Music is made of intervals. Intervals are not merely mathematical or technical calculation of note distances. How one feels and thus traverses any given interval is what gives music its emotional life.


I feel there’s no genre of music where the feeling of the interval is more crucial and life-giving than in opera. I’ve been guest-leading the OperaHK Orchestra in Gounod’s Romeo and Juliet these couple weeks, and I’ve been indulging in feeling ALL the intervals everyday. (Also indulging in playing with such a fantastic ensemble. The group’s energy and musicianship has been a treat.) Perhaps it is because the drama and the framework of a plot (no matter how simple or at times, even simplistic) adds to the potency of every emotion. And there’s how the timing of the music needs to fit so precisely into the rhythm of the drama. One has to go from shock to despair in exactly 2 and a half beats, and the timing of HOW the former transforms into the latter needs to be bang on, too! (It has to make sense emotionally, like acting. Even if you’re only playing an orchestra tutti part.) I find opera to be incredibly cathartic. It is a luxurious outlet to have allowance to feel, very intensely, but having the safety to do it with abandon in an extremely controlled manner. I think some form of this paradoxically simultaneous indulgence and escape is probably what draws a lot of people to the arts. As someone who can have too many messy feelings in life at times, I think the drama and theater that anchors the emotions is the exact order that this sometimes chaos of a psyche needs!

I still can’t put my finger on what makes the interval so potent in opera though. Those pleading diminished 7ths, the sighing augmented 4ths, the anguish in a simple half step. And yet here this one is of anger, but that other one is of total resignation. It’s akin to how Maria Callas said that all the acting instructions are in the text. For the musical instructions, the interval will guide you. But they need to be more than read and played. They need to be felt in order for any true understanding to emerge.

To feel intervals is to love them, which I think is a big part of what it means to love music. And the more deeply you feel it, the more music gives back. I was working on scales with a 6 year-old student the other day. Imagine my joy when he said during this commonly perceived as tedious exercise, “I love the mi-re-do, I love that part.” (I happened to have caught the moment on video too - see my story!) The simple, natural pleasure that he felt is at its crux one and the same as my love of indulging in operatic (and other) intervals. The only difference being our different emotional complexities.


Too many students are only taught how to play two notes, but not how to traverse the journey. Too many professional musicians, well, do the same. The precision in examining what to do with an interval is in fact the precision of good technique and good execution. It is also a musician’s signature. The ones who have unique voices are the ones who have distinct ways of finding paths from note to note, and from there being able to carve new worlds from phrase to phrase, movement to movement, piece to piece, genre to genre.


But it all starts from the interval. And it can begin as a simple mi-re-do with a child.


(Some additional materials: the opening section of Dvorak’s Humoresque is quite literally a series of intervals. There are many, many different ways to go about working on “feeling” intervals. Sometimes involving movement, sometimes examining the precision of bow speed and bow division, sometimes singing. In this lesson we explored all of those, and then some:)

Beginning of lesson

Deliberate (exaggerated) work

In context: during final run-through of lesson

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