
During Tanglewood’s Festival of Contemporary Music, Mr. Watts performed Hannah Lash’s Pressure, Friction, Impact for Cello and Piano in Ozawa Hall, as well as the world premiere of Colin Matthews’ String Quartet no. 5. While at the Cleveland Institute of Music and the Shepherd School of Music, Mr. Watts was able to premiere several works by emerging young composers.
Mr. Watts is a member of Houston’s KINETIC: The Conductorless Ensemble. In the summer of 2017 he travelled to the East Coast with a quartet of KINETIC members to perform on Nantucket with The Rossini Club and at the Caroga Lake Music Festival in New York. In 2016, Mr. Watts received a Richter Grant for music outreach to commission a work by Alexandra T. Bryant that KINETIC could use to play side-by-side with students and amateur musicians. The work was premiered on KINETIC’s January 2017 concert with students from Meyerland Performing and Visual Arts Middle School and Rice University non-major musicians.