Carol Dylan

Violin | Crystal Lake, IL

Carol Dylan comes from a family of professional musicians and has played violin most of her life. She received her Bachelor of Music degree, magna cum laude, from North Park University in Chicago where she was a pupil of Edgar Muenzer of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and where she was elected by the faculty to receive the University’s Lincoln Medallion award. She received her Master’s degree in Violin Performance and Literature from the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York as a scholarship pupil of Charles Castleman and attended the Aspen Music Festival as the recipient of a three-year fellowship to study with Dorothy DeLay and Masao Kawasaki.

Dylan was a member of the Civic Orchestra of Chicago for six seasons, spending two years as its co-concertmaster and winning the coveted Louis Sudler Award. She has been the assistant concertmaster of the Chicago Sinfonietta since 1994 and has participated in its numerous European and American tours, as well as in recordings with that group on the Fanfare and Cedille record labels. Dylan is a member of the first violin section of the Elgin Symphony and performs frequently as part of that orchestra’s educational chamber concert series, serving as the first violinist of the orchestra’s string quartet, ESQ. She is also the Assistant Concertmaster of the Midwest Mozart Festival Orchestra and can be heard on WFMT’s broadcasts of that group’s performances.

A sought-after chamber musician and coach, she was first violinist of the Lyra String Quartet for 14 years, performing throughout the Midwest and also serving as quartet-in-residence at Carthage College in Kenosha, Wisconsin.

Dylan was a member of the adjunct music faculty at North Park University in Chicago for 20 years and currently teaches violin at Elgin Community College in Elgin, along with coaching many area youth orchestra ensembles and chamber groups. 

She performs frequently with jazz and society bands in Chicago and also enjoys playing in theater orchestras, appearing with Chicago Opera Theater and ballet companies such as the Joffrey Ballet, the San Francisco Ballet, American Ballet Theater and the Bolshoi Ballet, as well as in many Broadway musicals and shows.

As a freelancer, Dylan performs with several orchestras in the Chicago area including the Ravinia Festival Orchestra and, in the past, the Woodstock Mozart Festival; she also plays in ensembles accompanying such stars as Luciano Pavarotti, Il Divo, and The Eagles.