Diego Vásquez is an interdisciplinary musician who loves to play the clarinet and twerk. He is Principal Clarinet of the Berkshire Opera Festival and Cayuga Chamber Orchestra, and Assistant Professor of Music at Ithaca College. His debut EP, “Dr Diego,” was released in 2022 from the seeds of classic deep house, disco, chiptunes and baroque organ music. He is currently working on an audio/visual album with composer Mark Olivieri.

Much of Diego’s work involves dance. In 2022 he worked for the Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra and the Lucerne Theater in the site-specific "STYX Tour: A Rendezvous with the Dead."  For the 2017-2018 season Diego was dancer/mime soloist in Karlheinz Stockhausen's INORI, produced by the Lucerne Festival and the Stockhausen Foundation, with performances at the Luzern KKL and the Berlin Philharmonie under the baton of Péter Eötvös. In 2019 Diego performed Stockhausen’s KLANG in Montreal, and UVERSA at Zelyonka Space Up in Kiev, Ukraine’s largest modern dance festival. He is scheduled to perform INORI with the Essen Philharmonie (Germany) in October 2026. Diego recently designed a new course at Ithaca College, called The Choreography of Music, exploring interdisciplinary performance art history and practice.

Diego completed his Doctor of Musical Arts at The Hartt School with a dissertation entitled “The Clarinet Writing in Wagner’s Parsifal as Synthesis of the Wagner/Nietzsche Relationship," his Master of Music from Mannes College The New School and his Bachelors of Music from Ithaca College. He has studied music history with Ira Braus and clarinet with Richard Faria, Ayako Oshima and Charles Neidich.

Photograph: Der Kleine Harlekin