Violinist Philip Setzer, a founding member of the Emerson String Quartet, was born in Cleveland, Ohio, and began studying violin at the age of five with his parents, both former violinists in the Cleveland Orchestra. He continued his studies with Josef Gingold and Rafael Druian, and later at the Juilliard School with Oscar Shumsky. In 1967, Setzer won second prize at the Marjorie Merriweather Post Competition in Washington, DC, and in 1976 received a Bronze Medal at the Queen Elisabeth International Competition in Brussels. He has since appeared with the National, Memphis, New Mexico, Puerto Rico, Omaha and Anchorage Symphonies, Aspen Chamber Symphony and on several occasions with the Cleveland Orchestra. He has also participated in the Marlboro Music Festival.

Setzer has been a regular faculty member of the Isaac Stern Chamber Music Workshops at Carnegie Hall and the Jerusalem Music Center. His article about those workshops appeared in The New York Times on the occasion of Isaac Stern's 80th birthday celebration. He also teaches as Distinguished Professor of Violin and Chamber Music at SUNY Stony Brook, and has given master classes at schools around the world, including the Curtis Institute, London's Royal Academy of Music, the San Francisco Conservatory, UCLA, the Cleveland Institute of Music and the Mannes School. His in-depth appreciation of Shostakovich’s string quartets led to the Emerson Quartet’s fruitful theatrical collaborations with Simon McBurney for “The Noise of Time” and with James Glossman for “Shostakovich and the Black Monk: A Russian Fantasy.”