Staff

Alexander Yudkovsky

Executive Director

Alexander Yudkovsky has performed extensively as soloist and chamber musician throughout the United States and Europe. He has appeared on tour as a soloist with the New American Chamber Orchestra and with the Brandenburg Collegium, and as concertmaster of the Spoleto Festival Orchestra for three years he was featured regularly in televised chamber music performances. Mr. Yudkovsky was born in Leningrad and came to the U.S. at the age of fourteen. He received his musical education at the Leningrad Special Music School, the Juilliard School, and the Rotterdam Conservatory. In recent years Mr. Yudkovsky has been increasingly recognized for his leadership in education in the arts. Prior to becoming the Executive Director of The School for Strings, Mr. Yudkovsky served as the Chairman of the Music Department at the Harlem School of the Arts and Music Director of the New Jersey State Youth Orchestra. Mr. Yudkovsky is also a founding member and co-director of the Lighthouse Chamber Players, an annual chamber music festival on Cape Cod.

Kerry Farrell

Operations Manager

Kerry was most recently the General Manager of the Belleayre Music Festival in the Catskill Mountains. He received a degree in Music Performance from the University of California, Los Angeles and performed in an array of musical situations throughout Southern California as a trombonist. After working on administration projects at the Young Musicians Foundation and the American Youth Symphony, Kerry went to work full time for the Henry Mancini Institute. Here he created education programs in cooperation with the Los Angeles Unified School District and many other large educational institutions in Southern California. In 2007 he joined the National Repertory Orchestra in Breckenridge, CO as Executive Director. An opportunity to work with Alondra de la Parra at the Philharmonic Orchestra of the Americas brought him to New York City. Kerry’s wife, Keve Wilson, plays oboe on Broadway a Portuguese Water Dog named Bugsy.

Lila Meretzky

Operations Assistant

Lila Meretzky is a composer, educator, and visual artist born and raised in New York City.  She works primarily in chamber, vocal, electronic, and electroacoustic mediums, as well as in music for dance, film, and installation.  Her work is often concerned with (the warping of) memory and language, and subjective experiences of time.  Lila’s music has been programmed and commissioned by leading ensembles and institutions, including Contemporaneous, TAK Ensemble, the MATA Festival, Sandbox Percussion, Unheard-of//Ensemble, icarus Quartet, and percussionist Ji Hye Jung.  Lila is a current composer-in-residence with the Cincinnati-based new music collective New Downbeat. She has created music for the dance companies New Dialect, X-Contemporary Dance, and the Nashville Ballet. Her film work includes scoring the 2022 documentary A Climate of Anxiety. As a critic, her writings have been published on the arts blog ArtsNash and she has been featured on the radio at WXNA Nashville. As an educator, she is on the faculty of the Walden School in Dublin, New Hampshire, and previously taught at the Yale School of Music’s Music in Schools Initiative, and W.O. Smith Music School in Nashville, Tennessee. She has also taught music technology and composition in the Yale College Department of Music. Lila has attended such festivals as the Next Festival of Emerging Artists, Cortona Sessions for New Music, and Bang on a Can Summer Festival. At Bang on a Can, her works were performed as part of the first LOUD Weekend at Mass MoCA in July 2021. Her other pursuits include performing with the choral ensemble C4, and making noise on her laptop and accordion.

Paper collage is her primary visual medium, and her work has been featured in Off Latch Press’ inaugural Off Latch Zine.

Lila is a graduate of the Blair School of Music at Vanderbilt University, where she co-founded a new music concert series called A Humming Under My Feet. She also holds Master of Music and Master of Musical Arts degrees in composition from the Yale School of Music.

Lila’s music is mainly self-published through OVNDROYT Music. Her vocal music can be found in the catalog of TUX People’s Music.

Evelyn Jacobson

Bookkeeper

Evelyn was born and raised in New Jersey. She has 2 beautiful daughters and 2 wonderful grandchildren. Evelyn has been a staff accountant/bookkeeper for more than 20 years, starting in legal accounting and then moving to an accounting firm with diversified clients. She has extensive experience with Quickbooks and tax preparation. Evelyn has been with The School for Strings since 2011.