Ashleigh Gordon

Ashleigh Gordon has performed throughout North America, Europe, and Hong Kong, ranging from solo, chamber and orchestral music settings to off-Broadway and new music productions. 

Passionate about contemporary music, Ashleigh performs regularly with Boston's Callithumpian Consort, NYC's  ECCE Ensemble, and the Grammy award winning Boston Modern Orchestra Project. From 2013-2017, she served as founder and violist of Boston's contemporary music string trio Sound Energy. Ashleigh has worked and recorded with Switzerland's Ensemble Proton and Germany's Ensemble Modern; performed with Boston Landmark's Orchestra, Odyssey Opera and A Far Cry; and recently performed with Chineke! Orchestra, Europe's first majority Black/minority ethnic orchestra at the prestigious BBC Proms Festival. Excited by collaborations, Ashleigh enjoys working with living composers and has worked with Beat Furrer, Thomas Adès, Heinz Holliger, Helmut Lachenmann, Chaya Czernowin, Steve Reich, Matthias Pintscher and Jeffrey Mumford among many others. Comfortable on an international stage, Ashleigh has performed in Jordan Hall and Symphony Hall (Boston), the DiMenna Center and MoMA (NYC), the Royal Albert and Royal Festival Halls (London), Konzerthaus Berlin and Oper Frankfurt  (Germany), Gare du Nord and Dampfzentrale Bern (Switzerland), Centre Pompidou (Paris), the Lee Hysan Concert Hall (Hong Kong) , and throughout Sofia, Bulgaria as part of the multi-disciplinary 180 Degrees Festival. 

Ashleigh is a firm believer in holistic teaching and strives to spark curiosity in the arts, foster necessary life skills through music and serve as a mentor to each child. As an advocate of social change through education, she is a viola instructor in the Boston Youth Symphony Orchestra's Intensive Community Program (ICP), a rigorous string instrumental program which provides instruction to populations often underrepresented in classical music. Prior to ICP, she served as a teaching artist, mentor and violist of musiConnects, a unique organization serving students, communities and families through the transformative power of chamber music. 

Equally invested as an arts programmer, Ashleigh is Artistic Director and violist of Castle of our Skins,  a Boston-based concert and educational series devoted to celebrating Black Artistry through music. With Castle of our Skins, she has helped create thought-provoking concert experiences that blend music and spoken word with history and culture at the Museum of African American History and Roxbury Community College. As a teaching artist, she has co-designed and led educational workshops for over 1,000 youths in the Greater Boston area primary schools and community centers. In recognition for her advocacy of social and cultural awareness, she has given presentations at IDEAS UMass Boston and the North Carolina Governor's School of the West; has been featured in the June 2015 International Musician Magazine, the Boston Globe and Improper Bostonian; and awarded the St. Botolph Emerging Artist and Charles Walton Diversity Advocate award from the American Federation of Musicians.

Ashleigh attended the International Ensemble Modern Academy (IEMA) at the Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst Frankfurt, a year-long program in Germany focused on the study and performance of contemporary music. As the sole IEMA violist, she studied and performed with members of Ensemble Modern with highlight appearances at IRCAM (Paris), Royaumont Abbeye (France), and the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie Karlsruhe (Germany). Continuing her new music passion throughout her summers, Ashleigh has participated in numerous festivals in Germany, Austria, France, England and North America including the Britten-Pears Young Artist Programme and 46 Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik in Darmstadt, Germany studying with the Arditti Quartet, Ensemble Modern and Le Nouvel Ensemble Moderne among others. Along with receiving a Master of Contemporary Music degree from IEMA, Ashleigh received degrees in viola performance from the New England Conservatory and Baldwin Wallace University Conservatory of Music. Her primary teachers include Carol Rodland and Louise Zeitlin with supplemental solo and chamber music studies with Stephen Drury, Eric Rosenblith and Mai Motobuchi of the Borromeo String Quartet. She can be heard on chamber music and orchestral recordings under the Mode, Siemens, BMOP/Sound, Navona and Musiques-Suisse record labels.