Gabriel Schaff is a violinist, historian, educator, and an internationally recognized author of books and articles pertaining to stringed instruments and bows, and the music written for them. His most recent contribution to the field is TOURTE (2023), a biography of the originator of the modern bow, written in collaboration with Paul Childs, Isaac Salchow, and Lucy Sante. Strad Magazine stated “ this long-awaited volume is at last here…no one interested in bows should pass by this book.” In addition, Schaff’s 2009 book The Essential Guide to Bows of the Violin Family was hailed in the string world as an unprecedented and valuable combination of historical, theoretical, and practical information on all aspects of bows. Strad Magazine praised it as “excellent…well-thought-out and well-written” and a “valuable contribution to the literature.” Mr. Schaff’s article exploring an overlooked corner of the violin repertoire, “Rediscovering Haydn’s Three Original Violin Sonatas,” was published in 2013 in the Australian Strings Association’s Stringendo magazine. As a stringed-instrument and bow specialist, Mr. Schaff has served as the curator and archivist at the Si-Yo Music Society Foundation (now Classically Connected, Inc.) and was a central creator of their fine instrument database and registry. 

As a lecturer, Mr. Schaff crafted a series of three Beethoven lectures presented by Orchestra Lumos (formerly the Stamford Symphony) and Ferguson Library in Stamford, Connecticut in honor of the Beethoven@250 celebrations. He has served on the faculty of Essex County College in New Jersey as a lecturer in the Humanities division, evolving a course entitled “Music in Society” (a modified version of which he has presented to audiences as young as elementary school). As a professional freelance violinist in New York City, Mr. Schaff is a tenured member of Orchestra Lumos, the Northeastern Pennsylvania Philharmonic, and the Scandia Symphony Orchestra. He has also performed with groups as diverse as the American Symphony Orchestra, Opera Orchestra of New York, Bronx Arts Ensemble, Glimmerglass Opera Festival, New Jersey Symphony, Jerusalem Symphony, and Orchestra of St. Luke’s. He has also appeared in several Broadway productions, the David Letterman Show, various TV and movie sets including The Gilded Age,The Greatest Showman, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Mildred Pierce, Succession, and Vinyl. He even had a stint appearing with the 1980s punk-rock band The Plasmatics. He is founder and director of the Englewood Chamber Players, a nonprofit dedicated to presenting interactive and informative concerts in underserved communities. Please see the ECP page on this website.

Originally from Philadelphia, Mr. Schaff was admitted into the New School of Music (now part of Temple University) at the age of sixteen under the guidance of the Curtis String Quartet before moving to New York City as a scholarship student of Erick Friedman at the Manhattan School of Music, where he later served as Friedman’s teaching assistant. Mr. Schaff’s mother was the acclaimed composer and musicologist Claire Polin (1926-1995). Beginning in the 1980s, during the cultural embargo between the U.S. and Soviet Union, Polin traveled to various Soviet republics thirteen times to interface with other avant-garde composers, bringing American compositions in exchange for Soviet scores, and presenting “unofficial” exchange concerts in Philadelphia and New York that juxtaposed Soviet and American composers. She was personally responsible for the US premieres of countless works from the Soviet and Eastern Bloc that are now fixtures of the 20th-century musical canon. Mr. Schaff, in collaboration with his mother’s advocacy, gave many of the U.S. premieres of these solo and chamber works in the 1980s by such luminaries as Edison Denisov, Elena Firsova, Sofia Gubaidulina, Giya Kancheli, Alfred Schnittke, Valentin Silvestrov, and Dmitri Smirnov, among many others. Please see Polin’s page on this website.

Mr. Schaff resides just outside of New York City.