a very beautiful place. So island to island, Manhattan to Tanna; I'm thinking a lot more quartet works and the year before that I went to the South Pole. I went to Antarctica for four weeks and did a serious of acoustic portraits of ice as well. So
And I don't need to have more than one instrument. quartets kind of right.
i would also say that that the implication of this book and answer to your question it's not this isn't a a quartetory book it's not a piece of propaganda it's but the implication is very optimistic in terms of your question uh in the following way the na someone once said in the 1940s when they were describing the nation magazine that
The two movements that we'd like to play from a quartet that has a nickname, Death and the Maiden. This quartet was written after a poem by a man named Matthias Claudius. And the poem is very short.
nickname for the entire quartet . The quartet , which is four movements, is very much in the same vein as the poem, and there's an amazing thing that Schubert does, which is going between a dark minor tonality-- very ominous-- to something that's brighter, more optimistic.
This setting-- this very setting, with people gathered around comfortably, television cameras, was exactly what Mozart and Haydn had in mind when they were composing their greatest quartets in the 1780s, and in Haydn case, into the 1790s. The genre really started in the 1750s. '50s A young Haydn started writing some string quartets .
So we have Joel and Bryan on violin, and then Camden on the cello, and Milena-- Milena on the viola. The Dover Quartet was recently named a quartet in residence for the Kennedy Center in DC, which is amazing news, so congrats to them. And they're also the official quartet in residence at Northwestern University, where they currently teach.
They came out with two CDs last year and they are available on Google Play Music, so you should check them out. Search Dover Quartet , and it should come up. Milena, I'm just going to hand it over to you so you can talk a bit more about the quartet and the music.
So eventually one day, the two halves of us, a quote unquote "bottomless quartet " and a "topless quartet " joined together to form a full quartet . We loved playing with each other, and very quickly, we had this thing that we call the relationship talk.
came out. Michael Tree and Arnold Steinhardt, the founding violist and first violinist of the Guarneri Quartet will both be here tonight. [MUSIC - DOVER QUARTET , "REPERTOIRE"] Next step for the Dovers is for them not to be somewhat of an insider's secret in chair music, and that is something that's already changing.
But folks, some of us still just call it spirits. of barbershop quartet , which sounds delicious.
So for us today-- and I know I have a mix. How many string quartet players in the audience? A few. Yeah, so there's some hardcore people.
So here's the opening of Opus 20, Number 2. [MUSIC - HAYDN STRING QUARTET , OP. 20 #2, FIRST MOVEMENT]
I would be so down. Comedy folk court quartet ? I wish. I hope.
And I had to sit on the desk. Turtle Island String Quartet -- this was done for them.
It would've been wonderful to eavesdrop on those evenings. But this quartet was written as a set of three-- one of a set of three that was dedicated to the King of Prussia, who was an amateur cellist.
that's the movement that we're going to play from the string quartet , which then took the title of the poem as its nickname for the entire quartet . The quartet , which is four movements, is very much in the same vein as the poem, and there's an amazing thing that
he put it in a string quartet -- sort of worked it into his music. And the string quartet typically has a small audience, so it didn't get the kind of feature that his operas, which often got him into trouble, did. But this work by Britten is just a charming work.
They can feel the vibrations in a way that their electronic reproductions just don't give when they listen to music, and it becomes an extraordinary visceral experience. So the quartet as an art form is a lot easier to get around than a symphony. The repertoire is vast.
There's also some wonderful stories of the composers themselves playing together-- Mozart and Haydn getting together, reading through their latest string quartets , and that's kind of how they communicated. It was like, I can do that better than you kind of thing.
I mean, we had Elijah Cummings in Congress. We have representative Clyburn, who's the Democratic whip. We have you know, the AOC and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, representative Alexandra of course CEO Quartet . Um, but to hear those stories, what I really wanted to do is have ah variety of voices toe Have the newer members of Congress Senator Booker on Bond that Ayanna Pressley but also toe
The Dover Quartet was recently named a quartet in residence for the Kennedy Center in DC, which is amazing news, so congrats to them. And they're also the official quartet in residence at Northwestern University, where they currently teach. They also just performed at Carnegie Hall with superstar violinist Janine Jansen and pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet.
There was an educated community and people who had never gone-- couple of years of elementary school discussing the latest varieties of Freudian psychoanalysis, the last concert of the Budapest string quartet and so on. There was worker education that took place, a lot of it through the unions.
But Haydn's the real B. So we'll let the quartet explain more about why Haydn it is so important and interesting, even in these times, as well as in his own time. Now, I want to introduce the players.
You mentioned Brahms. He owned the original manuscript, annotated all sorts of things. Beethoven hand-copied all six of these quartet parts himself, arranged one for string orchestra before he decided to challenge the genre and write his Opus 18. Mozart, of course, was a close friend and passionate follower of Haydn, and knew these quartets intimately before writing his own.
And we're talking about democracy a lot these days. This is the first time where the quartet really became a totally democratic thing. You'll hear Opus 20, Number 2 beginning, shockingly-- and I know for us, the shock is somewhat tempered.
Up until this point, string quartet playing was tune, diva, backup band. So what happens to begin this quartet signifies a really cataclysmic change in what the quartet could be. So here's the opening of Opus 20, Number 2.
We're not going to retune. That's with a string quartet with Jerry Quickley.
Michelle Obama-- most of you know who she is. The metaphor I prefer is the jazz quartet .
His innermost feelings about the way he viewed the world. Composers have often used the string quartet , because it's this incredibly transparent, intimate art form, to express some of these feelings that they perhaps otherwise wouldn't express in an opera or in a symphony, or in some larger scale work.
When he had something to say that he didn't want to be too scrutinized by the upper echelon of the government, so he put it in a string quartet -- sort of worked it into his music. And the string quartet typically has a small audience, so it didn't get the kind of feature that his operas, which often got him into trouble, did.
He wouldn't have paid them enough, actually. This is the only instrument in the quartet that actually could have participated in the premier performance of any of these works that we play today, because it was made in 1750 in Genoa, Italy.
And I don't need to have more than one instrument. They were both in the string quartet .
And I don't need to have more than one instrument. would be playing in a string quartet , performing widely, teaching at a university, teaching music, and making a
And I don't need to have more than one instrument. And another thing about the quartet -- when I joined this quartet , I fully anticipated that I would lose a little hair, become gray, and see myself--
And I don't need to have more than one instrument. I think the great thing about the quartet , and I think why a lot of young people get excited about it, is that you are a member of a team.
first piece but um my husband and I uh my husband is David FCO on the Emerson quartet um we were looking for a project that is sort of experimental so we found Silicon Valley fascinating and I have to tell you eight years ago when we came here
Drake, yeah, the artist, Drake. There's another Swedish band called Bear Quartet .
And this is over 100 years ago he was saying this. "Every page of this six Opus 20 quartets is of historic and aesthetic importance. There's perhaps no other opus in the history of instrumental music which has achieved so much and so quietly."
Not necessarily to London, but to England, and the composer Benjamin Britten. Britten wrote three beautiful string quartets , and he wrote earlier than he wrote the string quartets . In 1933, when he was 20 years old-- 19, I guess, officially when he wrote these works.
Were they done for members of the public, or for friends? Did they do an entire couple of quartets in an evening, or did they just play in movements? Things like that. Well, great question.
And I don't need to have more than one instrument. It's not Mozart's string quartets .
My name is June, and I am a Googler on the global business strategy team based in 1098 in Mountain View. I'm super excited to introduce you to the Dover Quartet , who I'm very lucky to call personal friends. I just saw them yesterday perform at the Green Music Center in Sonoma, and they did a phenomenal job, and they'll be performing some of the pieces they
So we went to Rice University in Houston where they have a special program for string quartets where they take one group every two years to do a masters degree specializing in string quartet . So we went there.
about your music-making. So you're doing it. - They have really become the leading young string quartet in the world. And they play 120 concerts a year, which is a schedule that very, very few quartets maintain.
OK, cool, yeah. That's about what I was expecting. So this whole thing started-- we play string quartet concerts for a living, basically. We guide the youth of Stanford musically speaking, I suppose, as well.
And this is what Haydn lays down for us. [MUSIC- HAYDN, STRING QUARTET OP. 20, #2, SECOND MOVEMENT]
And we're in dance mode. [MUSIC - HAYDN, STRING QUARTET OP.
in the public-- in the service sector, cannot increase. And his argument was that you-- to have Beethoven's string quartet played when Beethoven was alive, you required four people. To have it played now, you require four people.
But in another more important sense, it's not true. Now you can listen to Beethoven's string quartet , you can listen to all the music in the world, virtually free, at an incredible quality. And I think that logic, the logic of the digitalization of information, means that you can begin to introduce the sort of productivity improvements