Raphael Hillyer

Raphael Hillyer

Raphael Hillyer is an American viola soloist, teacher, and was a guiding light of the formation of the Tokyo String Quartet. His distinguished career includes co-founding the highly acclaimed Julliard String Quartet where he played in a peerless ensemble for 23 seasons.

Biography

Hillyer was born in Ithica, NY to Russian parents. Hillyer studied in America and in the former Soviet Union; when he was 10, his ear-training teacher in Leningrad was the young Dmitri Shostakovich. In addition to musical studies at the Curtis Institute, Hillyer completed a degree in mathematics at Dartmouth and graduate work in music and math at Harvard, where he encountered the young Leonard Bernstein, who composed a violin sonata for Hillyer in 1939, when Bernstein was 21. The two musicians were also fellows in the first two summers of the Tanglewood Music Center.

Career

Raphael Hillyer was a member of the Boston Symphony Orchestra from 1942 until he left for the Juilliard Quartet in 1946. After leaving the quartet, he taught at Yale, Harvard, and Boston University, among other institutions, and served as mentor to the Tokyo String Quartet and to countless other ensembles and individual musicians. Hillyer currently resides in Boston, MA.