Composer & Violist
Genevieve Knoebel is a young American composer of melodious, emotionally compelling music, which incorporates both traditional classical music and contemporary technological innovation. Utilizing effects pedals such as harmony, delay, and looper, she creates intricate soundscapes, both complex and beautiful. Genevieve’s experience as an orchestral, soloist, and chamber musician, as well as her appearances in Bluegrass, Hip-Hop and various World and Folk music groups, has lent a universal appeal to her music.
In her concert of premiers, “New Instruments, New Music,” Genevieve had the honor of presenting and performing several new works for the 2023 Bayreuth Festival junger Künstler in Bayreuth, Germany. More recently, she has been invited to perform her music as an Artist-in-Residence for the 2024 Vielklang Festival in Tübingen, Germany, as well as the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she gave a guest artist recital in January 2024. Her work Ophis for Orchestra was honored in the 2024 Breaking Barriers Festival, hosted by Ravinia Festival, New Music USA, and the Taki Alsop Conducting Fellowship. The piece will have its official premiere in 2025, as part of Genevieve’s debut as Composer-in-Residence with the newly formed Illinois-based ensemble, Movable Feast.
Genevieve has played in many bands and has worked as a studio musician, notably for Elsinore’s studio album Yes, Yes, Yes. Her more recent projects include an ongoing collaborative project with film director Carrie Graham- in which they set Genevieve’s compositions to original film, and The Maji Collective- a fusion of funk, soul and electronic music.
A graduate of the University of Illinois in Music Education, Genevieve continues to play a leading role in that institution's electric strings program, mentoring and encouraging the next generation of performers and creators in this evolving medium.
Genevieve lives in Urbana, Illinois with her husband, mathematician Aaron Wittrig and her two children Lily and Wally.
Reviews
".....What makes the performances by Genevieve Knoebel and her three fellow players so attractive? It's not just the musical dignity, the substance, the "material", as the music philosopher Theodor W. Adorno would have called it. It's also the sound.....And so she works with pedals that have such homey names as "Whammy", "Delay" and "Looper".
Technology, however, is not the essence, but only the means to an end, yes: If one were only to hear the works and not see the musicians, one would only realize after careful listening that one was dealing with sounds that were artificially amplified and manipulated. The tonal language of Genevieve Knoebel, born in Chicago and raised in Illinois, is in truth committed to an unadulterated US American tradition, which, under the impression of a wide variety of local influences, focuses on the pure joy of music. In "Ephemera" it twitters as if it were a piece by Vivaldi (ephemeral, ephemeral: that's all music that fades away), "Ouroboros" is a string quartet of classical modernism, and the trio "Dryades" conquers with impressionistically shimmering sounds, in the airy world of the tree nymphs, indefinitely changing and with rhythmically amusing tones."
- Dr. Frank Piontek, Feuilleton, Bayreuth, August 2023 (Translated from German)