Biography

Cellist and musicologist John Lutterman is Professor of Music at the University of Alaska, Anchorage, where he teaches cello, chamber music and music theory, and where he directs America’s Northernmost period-instrument orchestra and viol consort. Prior to joining the Music faculty at UAA, Dr. Lutterman served on the faculty of Whitman College, Lawrence University, the University of the Pacific, Stony Brook University. the University of California at Davis, and the San Francisco Conservatory. 

Dr. Lutterman has given solo performances in Vienna, Salzburg, Munich, Basel, Belfast, New York, Washington D.C., Sacramento and San Francisco, including chamber music performances at Alice Tully Hall in New York and recitals of the complete cello works of Bach, Brahms and Chopin in Salzburg. He is equally at home on modern and period instruments, including Baroque, Transitional, and 19th-century cellos, and he has appeared as a chamber music partner with many prominent soloists, including Monica Huggett, John Solum, Arthur Haas, Wolfgang Brunner and Igor Kipnis. He has performed, toured, and made recordings with many leading period-instrument orchestras and chamber ensembles, including the Wiener Akademie, Salzburger Hofmusik, Philharmonia Baroque, the American Bach Soloists, and El Mundo.

A dedicated teacher, Dr. Lutterman’s cello students have been accepted into prestigious programs at Juilliard, Eastman, Peabody, Indiana University, the Basel Academy of Music, and the Royal Conservatory in the Hague. His theory and music history students have gone on to earn doctoral degrees at Yale, Stanford, UC Davis, and the University of Texas, and several of them now hold tenured positions at important American colleges and conservatories. 

Dr. Lutterman holds the Doctor of Musical Arts degree from Stony Brook University. His primary cello teachers were Bernard Greenhouse, Timothy Eddy Steven Doane, Jane Cowan, Klaus Adam, Harvey Shapiro, and Myron Lutzke, and he has performed in the cello masterclasses of David Soyer, Gary Hoffman, Raya Garbusova, Steven Isserlis, and Anner Bylsma. His primary chamber music mentors include Felix Galimir and Klaus Adam, with each of whom he had weekly coaching as a member of the graduate piano trio and graduate string quartet at the Mannes School of Music. Further chamber music studies followed with Gilbert Kalish, Julius Levine, Charles Treger, and members of the Beaux Arts and New Arts Trios, as well as the Guarneri, Galimir, Audubon, and Orion String Quartets. 

After completing his D.M.A., Dr. Lutterman spent four years performing, doing research, and pursuing post-doctoral studies in Europe. He studied Baroque cello and viola da gamba with Christoph Coin at the Schola Cantorum in Basel; with Jaap ter Linden at the Royal Conservatory in the Hague; and with Nicolaus Harnoncourt at the Mozarteum in Salzburg. 

Dr. Lutterman also holds the Ph.D. in historical musicology from the University of California at Davis, where he completed a dissertation on Bach’s cello suites as artifacts of historical improvisatory practices. His articles have appeared in Speculum Musciae, Early Music America, Strings, and San Francisco Classical Voice.  His teaching and research interests include performance practice, particularly historical improvisatory practices, the history of theory, the ethno-historiographic study of the relation between written and orally/aurally transmitted musical practices, the aesthetics of absolute music, and the historical development of the modern concept of a musical “art-work.” 

Dr. Lutterman is one of a small, but growing community of scholar-performers who are seeking to re-create historical improvisatory practices. The journal Ad Parnassum lauded his performance of "an astounding semi-improvised fantasy suite for unaccompanied cello" at the 14th International Conference on Baroque Music in Belfast, Ireland.