Baroque violinist Martin Davids received a Performer Diploma from Indiana University where he studied with Stanley Ritchie.  He also earned a Masters degree from the University of Michigan.  In addition to directing the Callipygian Players, Chicago’s premier Baroque chamber music ensemble, Mr. Davids is concertmaster for Publick Musick, Bach Collegium of Ft. Wayne, Janus Ensemble, Bach Chamber Orchestra and the Musical Patriots.  He is principal second violin in Chicago’s period instrument orchestra The Baroque Band and regularly performs with Brandywine Baroque, Indianapolis Baroque Orchestra, and the Bach Institute in Valparaiso.  Other ensembles he has played with include Chicago Opera Theater, Central City Opera, Music of the Baroque, Arcadia, Toronto Consort, Washington Bach Consort and numerous others across Canada and the U.S.  He is a founding member of the electric Baroque ensemble Discontinuo and is in demand as an electric violinist.  His  recordings have been highly praised by critics and can be heard on the Musica Omnia, Plectra, Albany and Sonabilis labels.  Besides performing, Mr. Davids teaches violin at Loyola University in Chicago and often gives master classes in performance practice and improvisation at many schools and universities.  He lives in Chicago with his wife Julia, a talented singer and conductor, and his daughter Judith.

Active as a performer on organ, clavichord, harpsichord, and fortepiano in North America and Europe, David Yearsley was educated at Harvard College and Stanford University, where he received his Ph.D. in Musicology in 1994. That same year he became the only musician in the history of the Bruges Early Music Festival to win all its major prizes. His organ recordings include: Music of a Father and Son: The Organ Works of Delphin and Nicolaus Adam Strungk heard on the Arp Schnitger organ in Norden, Germany and The Great Contest: Bach, Scarlatti, Handel. Mr. Yearsley has written numerous articles on European musical culture in the 17th and 18th centuries, and his work has appeared in leading scholarly journals such as the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Music & Letters, Early Music  and Eighteenth-Century Music. His widely-praised book, Bach and the Meanings of Counterpoint appeared in 2002 from Cambridge University Press. Mr. Yearsley has been  an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the Humboldt University in Berlin and a Wenner-Gren Foundation Fellow at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. For more than a decade he has been music critic for the infamous country weekly, the Anderson Valley Advertiser. A member of the pioneering synthesizer trio, Mother Mallard’s Portable Masterpiece Company, he is Associate Professor of Music at Cornell University.