Violinist and chamber musician Andrew Jennings, who is professor of music at the University of Michigan and also holds the Beatrice Proctor Master Teacher Chair at the Tanglewood Music Center in Massachusetts, will present a chamber music master class at the West Virginia University Creative Arts Center on Saturday, March 5.

The class will be held from 10 a.m. to noon in the Bloch Learning and Performance Hall (Room 200A). It is free and open to the public.

Several WVU student string quartet groups will also perform during the class.

Jennings is a graduate of the Juilliard School, where his principal teachers were Ivan Galamian, Alexander Schneider, Pamela Gearhart and Raphael Druian.

He was a founding member of the Concord String Quartet, which quickly gained international recognition by winning the Naumberg Chamber Music Award in 1972 and performing 1,200 concerts throughout the United States, Canada and Europe.

Specializing in new works by American composers, the Quartet gave more than 50 premieres and commissions. It also performed the standard repertory and 32 cycles of the complete Beethoven quartets and made numerous recordings, three of which were nominated for Grammy Awards.

Jennings maintained his association with the Quartet until it disbanded in 1987 and subsequently formed The Concord Trio with Norman Fischer and Jeanne Kierman, which debuted in 1993.

His teaching career began at Dartmouth College, where members of the Concord Quartet were engaged as artists-in-residence from 1974 to 1987. He also served on the faculty of Oberlin College. In addition to teaching violin and chamber music at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, he also devotes his summers to chamber music instruction at the Tanglewood Music Center and to the Musicorda School for String at Holyoke, Mass.

His recordings may be found on RCA , Nonesuch, Vox, Turnabout, Equilibrium, Danacord and MMO .

For more information about the master class, contact the College of Creative Arts at 304-293-4841 ext. 3108.