Joanna Ruth Livioco-Tumpalan

Ruth Tumpalan is a violinist and music educator currently based in the greater New York City area. Her students enjoy making music and have performed in prestigious concert halls such as Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center and have made successful auditions to youth orchestras such as New Jersey Symphony Youth Orchestra.

As a performer, she has performed in venues such as the White House (together with her husband in their violin-percussion duo), Carnegie Hall (Perelman stage and Weill Recital Hall), Lincoln Center, Walt Disney Concert Hall, Esplanade in Singapore, and other prestigious venues around the world (Tokyo, Beijing, Hong Kong, etc). Aside from this, she was also a prize winner in the Concert Artists International Competition and has been invited to perform for dignitaries. She was formerly the Assistant Concertmaster of the Philippine Philharmonic Orchestra (the Philippine’s national orchestra) and has been featured soloist by the said orchestra and by the Manila Symphony Orchestra. She won national and international grants and scholarships to attend music festivals such as Green Mountain Chamber Music Festival and the Asian Youth Orchestra where she did two summers of concert tours to several cities in Asia such as Tokyo, Hong Kong, Singapore, Beijing, Hanoi, among others.

With full scholarship and teaching assistantship, Ruth completed her masters degree at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst where she studied with Elizabeth Chang. In graduate school, she became part of the UMass Graduate Quartet and occasionally led the Opus One (a conductor-less orchestra) as concertmaster. For her undergraduate, she finished Bachelor of Music from the University of the Philippines with cum laude distinction with Arturo Molina and continued lessons later with Joseph Esmilla and Sergio Esmilla.

Ruth has had the privilege of taking solo and chamber masterclasses/lessons from well known musicians such as Christoph Poppen, members of the Juilliard String Quartet, etc. She has also played with some of the great artists both in classical and popular music such as Wang Jian, Alban Gerhardt, Jaime Laredo, and Michael Buble.

Ruth is now a faculty and the artistic director of Play It Forward School of Music based in New Jersey.