Violinist Frederick Halgedahl has been a member of the 1st violin sections of the National Symphony Orchestra, the Hamilton Philharmonic and Philharmonic Virtuosi, the orchestra of the Hamburgische Staatsoper, and the North German Radio Symphony (N.D.R.). In addition, he has served as concertmaster of the Waterloo/Cedar Falls, Cedar Rapids, Des Moines, and Savannah (GA) Symphony Orchestras, and the New Hampshire Music Festival.

Beginning his academic career in 1975, Halgedahl has chaired string faculties at the University of Oklahoma, Western Washington University, and the University of Northern Iowa, where he has taught since 1986. He was a member of the Oklahoma Trio for five years, helped found Seattle's Sonora String Quartet, and has been a member of the Canadian chamber group Metamorphosis.

Halgedahl is a Performance graduate of the Eastman School, where his teachers included Millard Taylor, Francis Tursi, and John Celentano. After returning to his native Kansas to complete an M.M. as a teaching assistant at Emporia State University, he quickly established his symphonic career, winning a position in the National Symphony upon completion of his degree in 1970.

Halgedahl's interests have always been wide-ranging, and in 1980 he accepted an invitation to head a new division of the Cosanti Foundation, home of visionary architect and philosopher Paolo Soleri, in Scottsdale, Arizona. As Director of Music/Poetry, he instituted a link between his career in music and his life-long love of literature, a connection that eventually won him an Iowa State Board of Regents Professional Development Leave to begin a book on the subject in 1994.

His scientific research (another sphere of interest) with physicist and faculty colleague Roger Hanson has resulted in invited papers at national and international scientific meetings, as well as publications in prestigious scholarly journals, such as that of the Catgut Acoustical Society. Both Physics Today and Science News have noted their pioneering investigations of "ALF" tones (anomalous low frequencies), a phenomenon of the bowed string known to have been practiced by Paganini.

More recently, Halgedahl has traveled to Russia with faculty colleague Jonathan Chenoweth, performing in St. Petersburg's prestigious House of Composers and lecturing at Herzen Pedagogical Institute. In October, 1999, he accepted the newly created position of Associate Concertmaster of the New Hampshire Music Festival, a professional chamber orchestra with which he has been associated for over thirty years.

In addition to a busy schedule of chamber music performances which, this academic year, has included the Mendelssohn Octet, Brahms C minor Quartet, String Sextet from Capriccio, by Strauss, Mozart's G minor String Quintet, Crusell's Clarinet Quartet in Bb, and the Ravel Duo, Halgedahl will teach a Presidential Seminar in British and American Poetry during the Spring semester. "This Living Hand," (after Keats' poem) will emphasize the memorization and recitation of poetry, reviving an old tradition of introducing this most musical of all the literary arts as a study of phrase, line and breath.