Rose Hashimoto was born and raised in Seattle, Washington. She began her musical education as a pianist at the age of four, and started playing the viola when she was eight.
Rose has performed in Carnegie Hall, Avery Fisher Hall, Alice Tully Hall, Jordan Hall, Benaroya Hall, Climate Pledge Arena, and many other venues around the US, as well as Canada, China, England, France, Germany, Japan, and Switzerland. She played on the Experiential Orchestra’s Grammy-winning recording of The Prison by Ethel Smyth and on A Far Cry’s Grammy-nominated album Visions and Variations.
Rose was a member of the self-directed string orchestra Shattered Glass Ensemble and violist of the Thalia Quartet, who served as the Quartet in the Community for the 2013 Banff International String Quartet Competition.
Ever since she first got to know the chamber music repertoire in her early teens, Rose has been an avid chamber musician. She has performed at Bargemusic in Brooklyn, NY, Icicle Creek Chamber Music Festival in Leavenworth, WA, Birdfoot Chamber Music Festival in New Orleans, LA, Manchester Summer Chamber Music in Manchester-by-the-Sea, MA, Kneisel Hall in Blue Hill, ME, Yellow Barn in Putney, VT, and Taos School of Music in Taos, NM. She has performed as a guest with the Aelous, Argus, Momenta, and Ulysses Quartets and the Boston-based chamber orchestra A Far Cry.
Rose loves performing music in unusual settings, and she is always searching for ways to create concert experiences that are more accessible, informal, and enjoyable for people of all ages and backgrounds.
With cellist James Waldo, Rose co-founded the organization Listen Closely. Listen Closely’s mission was building community through music by presenting highly accessible, inclusive, and interactive concerts in the Inwood neighborhood of Manhattan. The organization presented over 90 events in the neighborhood over the course of 6 years and commissioned several new works by local composers.
Rose led the Kneisel Hall/Blue Hill: Together in Music residency in September 2018, bringing alumni of Kneisel Hall Chamber Music Festival into schools and community centers in Blue Hill, Maine for an intensive week of community-building. In July 2015, Rose organized a community-based tour of the Pacific Northwest with the Evergreen String Quartet. Over the course of two and a half weeks, the quartet performed 22 free concerts in places including libraries and hospitals, a garden, a homeless shelter, and an aquarium.
A dedicated violin and viola teacher, Rose currently serves on the faculty of the Suzuki Institute of Seattle. She has also served on the faculty of Seattle Youth Symphony Summer Music, Kaleidoscope School of Music, Lucy Moses School at the Kaufman Music Center, the Preparatory Center for the Performing Arts at Brooklyn College, and the El Sistema-inspired Harmony Program. She completed the two-year intensive Suzuki Teacher Training program at the School for Strings in New York and has also received training in the Paul Rolland and Mark O’Connor schools of string pedagogy.
Rose earned a Bachelor of Music degree from The Juilliard School as a student of Toby Appel and earned a Master of Music and Professional Studies Diploma from Mannes College The New School for Music, where she studied with Hsin-Yun Huang and Laurie Smukler. She was the recipient of the George and Elizabeth Gregory Award for Excellence in Performance from Mannes. As a winner of the Mannes concerto competition, Rose performed the Schnittke Viola Concerto with the Mannes Orchestra. She has also performed in master classes with Kim Kashkashian, Thomas Riebl, Marcus Thompson, and Lars Anders Tomter.
She plays on an American viola made in 2001 by Fairfax Abraham.