Violinist and fiddler Lily Honigberg was born in Washington DC. Her father, Steven Honigberg, is a cellist in the National Symphony, and her mother, Jessica Honigberg, is a local piano teacher and director of baroque music series "28 Chairs" in the greater DC area. Lily began playing the violin at age 4 and took weekly lessons in DC until moving to Northern Michigan in 2010 to study violin as a full time student at Interlochen Arts Academy.  Lily was fortunate to tour the United States with the National Youth Orchestra in 2014, performing in Carnegie Hall, Walt Disney Hall, and many halls in between with Gil Shaham as soloist. Lily was always drawn to fiddle music and began learning traditional tunes by ear through the Suzuki method and recordings of music from Ireland and Scotland.

 

Upon graduating high school in 2014, Lily enrolled at the New England Conservatory in Boston as a student of Lucy Chapman and Nicholas Kitchen in the classical department. She graduated from NEC with a Bachelor’s degree in Classical Violin Performance in May 2018. She most recently completed her Master’s degree at NEC in Contemporary Improvisation, studying with Hankus Netsky, Eden MacAdam-Somer, Liz Knowles, Ran Blake, Lautaro Mantilla, Carla Kihlstedt and Tanya Kalmanovitch. She has been a part of ensembles at NEC including American Roots, the Persian Ensemble, the Contemporary Improvisation Chamber Ensemble, the Bluegrass Ensemble, the Film Noir Ensemble, Irish Ensemble, and John Zorn’s improvised game piece, Cobra. 

 

Lily spent 2016-2019 touring with her band Night Tree, an acoustic sextet that performed original and improvised folk-based music, which formed in 2016 after winning the Conservatory’s WildCard Honors Ensemble. She spent the summers of 2015 and 2016 traveling across Europe working and learning folk music from Ireland, England, Hungary and Austria. Lily has played with and learned from Irish musicians such as Winifred Horan, Seamus Egan and Martin Hayes. Lily also delightedly performs regularly with her father in settings that range from duets to chamber music to duo concertos with orchestra. They appear regularly together in the DC and Chicago areas. Lily has performed in venues such as Carnegie Hall, and the Kennedy Center's Millennium Stage, and she headlined the Korro Musikfestival in Sweden with Night Tree. Most recently, Lily joined the Palaver Guest Artist for Palaver Strings, based in Portland, Maine. Lily would have been joining the faculty at the Acadia Trad School in Bar Harbor, Maine 2020 teaching beginner fiddle alongside Liz Faiella. 

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Lily was a 2018/19/20 CPP teaching fellow representing the New England Conservatory and  currently teaches fiddle and violin lessons in the greater Boston area, and now online. 

 

Lily continues to pursue her passions and curiosities in classical, folk, Irish fiddle, and improvised music in various contexts across United States and Europe. Lily plays on a French violin made in 1895 by William Chanot. Outside of music, Lily is an Inferno Hot Pilates instructor in Cambridge. She enjoys Bikram yoga practice and petting giant dogs. 

 

More….Awards and Festivals

 

Lily won the MASTA Music Conference Competition of Michigan in 2012 and was a finalist in the United States Army Orchestra Young Artist Competition in 2013. She won second place in the Landon Symphonette Concerto Competition (2014). She also was a recipient of the 2013 Downbeat ward for best classical performance. She was concert-mistress of the Interlochen Arts Academy Orchestra (2014).  Lily has toured with the Interlochen Arts Academy Orchestra (2012) and the National Youth Orchestra of the United States (2014) from Carnegie Hall to Walt Disney Hall. The National Youth Orchestra was featured on NPR’s From the Top radio show in 2014. Her band, Night Tree, was awarded the Wildcard Honors Ensemble in 2016. 

 

Lily has attended summer festivals including the Meadowmount School of Music in Upstate New York, the Swannanoa Gathering in Asheville, NC, and the Acadia Trad School in Bar Harbor, Maine.  

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