After many years as a San Francisco Bay Area performer, educator, and recording artist, John Dornenburg now resides in the Cotswold region of the United Kingdom where he continues his musical pursuits. He has made over thirty CDs of both solo and chamber music on all sizes of viola da gamba and violone, three of which feature virtuoso music for the unaccompanied bass viol. As a viola da gamba soloist he has performed in the U.K., Ireland, the Netherlands, Turkey, Lebanon, Australia, New Zealand, and across the U.S.A., including appearances at the Istanbul International Festival, Krakow Festival, York Early Music Festival, Kilkenny Festival, Melbourne International Festival, Monadnock Festival, and Berkeley Early Music Festival. In addition to solo and chamber music concerts, he has frequently performed the obbligato viol parts in J.S. Bach’s St. Matthew and St. John Passions with organizations that include the San Francisco Symphony, Oregon Bach Festival, and Carmel Bach Festival.

John was director of the Sex Chordæ Consort of Viols, founder of the Baroque ensemble Music’s Re-creation, and co-director of the Archetti Baroque String Ensemble. He has been music director for productions of Monteverdi’s Vespers of 1610 and Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, and in 2005 he conducted four fully-staged performances of Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea. He has edited three published collections of 17th-century music for viol consort by John Hingeston, and has contributed reviews and articles to the Journal of Seventeenth Century Music and Early Music America.

Recently he has been performing in the U.K. and Ireland with the Geminiani Ensemble, a trio including Alison Bury on Baroque violin and Malcolm Proud on harpsichord. He also continues to be invited to perform on the violone with various early music ensembles and choirs. His latest interest is playing the electric bass guitar in a band with mates from his village.

From 1988-2018 John held the position of Lecturer in Viola da gamba at Stanford University, and for many years he also served as Instructor of Violone at the University of California, Berkeley. John has taught music history on the faculty of Carnegie-Mellon University and is Emeritus Faculty at the California State University, Sacramento, where he specialized in the Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque Eras as well as jazz history. He was an Adjunct faculty member at the University of Washington in Seattle for one year, and Artist-in-Residence at Melbourne University’s Early Music Studio in Australia.  In the U.S.A. John was a frequent faculty member at music workshops such as the Viola da Gamba Society Conclave and Viols West, and he also taught at the Amherst Early Music Workshop, Aston Magna, and at both the Medieval-Renaissance and the Baroque Summer Workshops of the San Francisco Early Music Society. For eleven years he directed the Stanford Viol Workshop.

He was awarded the Soloist’s Diploma for his studies with Wieland Kuijken at the Koninklijk Konservatorium in Den Haag, Holland, and he also studied Baroque performance practice with Nikolaus Harnoncourt at the Mozarteum in Salzburg, Austria.