SAT with Alexander K.

Alexander Cai Knecht, 29, completed a Doctor of Musical Arts at USC under full scholarship in 2018, where he studied with Brian Chen. He holds a master's degree from Juilliard, where he studied with Masao Kawasaki, and bachelors' degrees from La Sierra University, where he studied with Jason Uyeyama. In 2018, he became a member of the viola section of the Long Beach Symphony Orchestra. Since 2019, he has served as a Teaching Artist for the Caesura Youth Orchestra at Columbus Elementary School in Glendale. In 2019, he founded a free violin class outreach program at the Los Angeles Chinese Seventh-Day Adventist Church. He is a regular participant as a violinist in the liturgical music at St. Joseph the Worker parish in Loma Linda. He has been a mentor teaching strings in the CKC-Music community engagement program in San Bernardino since its founding in 2008, continuing to the present day through Zoom. This year he was featured in a live performance on AM 870 in Glendale, on the Impassioned Angels program.. Last summer he performed in an online celebration of the violin caprices of Sophie-Carmen Eckhardt-Grammaté, as part of a celebration of Canada Day hosted by Scott St. John of the Colburn School. He remains an active teacher and performer online. In past summers he has been a fellow at the Aspen Music Festival, the Music Academy of the West, and the Gonggeng Music Festival in Zhejiang Province, China. He comes from a musical family of Chinese, Korean and Caucasian ancestry including three siblings, all of whom play and teach string instruments.