On the beat
OBITUARIES
IRENE SHARP
US cellist and pedagogue Irene Sharp died on 13 July at the age of 87. She taught on the faculties of the Mannes College of Music and the University of California at Berkeley, and her students included soloist Matt Haimovitz, Philadelphia Orchestra principal cello Hae-yi Ni and Amos Yang, associate principal of the San Francisco Symphony.
Born in 1936, Sharp studied with Margaret Rowell and attended masterclasses with Pablo Casals at Berkeley in 1960. In 1996 she founded California Summer Music, a three-week summer training programme for young musicians, which has been going for more than two decades. Sharp was its artistic director. She also served on the faculties of Meadowmount School for Strings, Bowdoin Summer Music Festival, and Indiana University’s String Academy. Sharp was an invited speaker at the national meetings of the Music Teachers’ National Association and the Music Educators’ National Conference, and gave numerous teacher-training workshops worldwide.