Allow me to start out by listing some problems with living in Manhattan:
1. Levain Bakery. It is 2 blocks from my apartment, and this is a problem. The raspberry bomboloncini I got this morning... I just can't.
2. There is a chicken and waffles place literally behind my building
3. I keep getting on the wrong trains and ending up in the Bronx (this one is an actual problem)
4. There are so many wonderful musicians and friends on this tiny island, I feel like my heart might burst at any moment!!
We kicked off our residency at Juilliard and the start of a new academic year with a performance at Convocation, followed by a lavish picnic at Lincoln Center's lovely hyperbolic paraboloid (see below)
We could not be more excited about our Juilliard residency, which includes coachings with the members of the beloved Juilliard String Quartet, as well as the opportunity to help lead the undergraduate String Quartet Survey course and to coach undergraduate chamber ensembles.
Also thrilling is our new snazzy website, which you no doubt have already stumbled upon if you are reading this blog. Our old site served us well and was in fact kind of a miracle, as Nick and Greg actually taught themselves how to code and just built the thing themselves in Aspen. But it's time to move on, and I hope you enjoy the new scrolly homepage as much as I do. Please do drop by our schedule page, we are playing shows in
Washington DC
Sarasota, FL
NYC
Richmond, VA
Reading, PA
South Bend, IN
Austin, TX
Baltimore, MD
Mt. Vernon, OH
Colorado Springs
Artesia, NM
Hickory, NC
San Francisco, CA
Grand Rapids, MN
Vancouver, BC
Bolivar, MO
Stanford, CA
Winchester, VA
...just to throw some places out there. If we are in your town, let us know! We're probably just hanging out in a tiny elevator all together like this one at Washington DC's Cosmos Club, waiting to hang out with you-
Before I go, our friend Sara from the St. Lawrence String Quartet Seminar at Stanford wrote this great article on the program we've attended for three years and counting. Check it out and also enjoy this photo of SLSQ's Geoff Nuttall coaching Nick on his hairstyle:
I would be completely remiss if I didn't mention our most exciting news of all, which is that we will be serving as the new Graduate Resident String Quartet at the Juilliard School this fall! We are incredibly honored to be following in the footsteps of so many quartets before us. We are also incredibly homeless come late August, so if anyone needs a roommate let us know ;)
To excerpt a recent email from our dear friend and mentor, Martha Hilley -
"I know you have done things in 2013 so update your blog ! ! !"
Wise, wise words. Prof. Hilley is incidentally the reason this blog exists in the first place, as a spin-off project from a music business class years ago at UT. So when she says to update the blog, we update the blog!
We're happily back in UT territory for the rest of July, serving as Quartet in Residence at the Austin Chamber Music Center. Here's a silly video of Greg and me chatting with ACMC's lovely Michelle Schumann about the upcoming workshop, and life:
And in case you missed us somehow this morning on KUTX with the amazing human that is John Aielli, as well as lovely Michelle again, here we are playing some tunes on the radio:
So as Hurricane Sandy and possibly the end of the world approaches, I find myself in a reflective mood. I believe it was while standing in a line a mile long at the grocery store, trying to buy some laundry detergent, hemmed in by panicked shoppers stockpiling flashlights and dry goods, that I first considered I may not be taking this storm seriously enough. Having just returned from a glorious week of concerts and educational performances at middle and high schools in the Tacoma/Seattle area, my jetlagged and outreach-oriented mind has not yet switched to hurricane survival mode. We played for over 1500 students during our stay in Washington, generally at shockingly early times in the morning (who knew that high school started at 7:15am?!) Check out this clip, generously filmed by Brian Fox of the Puyallup School District, to get an idea of early morning Aeolus and our awesome audiences -
But outreach isn't all we've been up to in the past few weeks. We also took a quick jaunt to Germany, where we had delicious food and beer and got to play in the Laeiszhalle at Johannes-Brahms-Platz (pictured below).
And back in DC, we had one of our more surreal experiences as we found ourselves taking the stage directly after a speech by Joe Biden. We got the picture pretty quickly upon the realization that the entire backstage area was surrounded by Secret Service. Here's Greg musing over the speech in the wings -
But anyway I've just been informed that it may be prudent to fill up the tub in the event of manual toilet flushing. Manual toilet flushing??? Oh man. Stay safe east coast loved ones!
And also this picture, because it is amazing. Lesley Robertson of the SLSQ generously gave us a mini private screening of old string quartet videos, and we were delighted to catch this shot of our hero, Joel Krosnick!!!
I also find it necessary to add this photo of us with another hero, Professor Parker of the Gryphon Trio! Please check out his critically acclaimed series of instructional videos on Facebook, particularly if you are a violist :)
I know I said this was just going to be a video, but the kids participating in Stanford University's Educational Programs for Gifted Youth were so awesome. We feel honored to have been given the opportunity to get to know these guys - performing for them, discussing music with them, or just hanging out. At our last session with the EPGY guys, they each wrote their own short string quartet -and we read through all 2.5 hours of them :) here we are with Alan squared:
A huge thank you to the St. Lawrence Quartet for putting together an incredibly inspiring seminar, to Heidi Lee for organizing absolutely everything and taking us to all the best places to eat in the Bay Area, and Anna Wittstruck and the EPGY kids for being awesome.
Where do I even begin. Imagine my horror upon realizing that the last post on our beloved blog is from 2011!?!? Somehow amidst travels to Mexico and London, several memorable trips to New York, the creation of the Ultra-Trone (a programmed metronome device that deserves explanation in its own blog post), and the constant refinement of our tuning system (please refer to blog video #1) Aeolus' Spring 2012 has not yet been documented here! Let's start with this past week-
We returned to the incredibly inspiring Juilliard String Quartet Seminar for a week of coachings with first violinist Joseph Lin and violist Samuel Rhodes, culminating in performances in Juilliard's Paul Recital Hall by all participating groups. Our first time at the Seminar was in 2010, and it proved to be a pivotal experience in the development of our quartet. The 2010 Seminar also marked the first (and last) time all four of us stayed together in one hotel room for an entire week - thankfully, we have left those days far behind.
We are so grateful for the mentorship and inspiration provided by the Juilliard String Quartet!
Greg and Alan discussing the finer points of Beethoven's Op. 95 with Juilliard Quartet second violinist Ronald Copes.
Finding ourselves with just a little too much free time between our dress rehearsal and concert at Juilliard yesterday, we filmed a brief clip that I feel really captures the essence of Aeolus Quartet violist, Greg Luce. Please enjoy.
Another highlight of our spring has been some unique opportunities afforded us in our position as graduate quartet in residence at the University of Maryland. Professor Ken Slowik, extraordinary academic and curator of the rare instrument collection at the Smithsonian Institute, recently ushered us into the museum after hours and, to our amazement, unlocked the display cases and allowed us to play on an assortment of priceless Stradivarius and Amati instruments! This was a dream come true, made even more dream-like by the fact that we were alone in the Smithsonian at 11:30pm.
Professor Slowik removing instruments from their display case as Nick marvels at a Strad.
Greg holding possibly the world's most coveted viola - 1663 Nicolo Amati "Professor Wirth".
Thank you for keeping up with us, more to come soon! I promise!
We've had our share of critical attention over the years... but never like this. Check out some recent words from our new buddies at Mt. Penn Elementary's fourth grade class:
from tough critics:
"Thank you for coming to our school and playing for us. We all (even Tyler) enjoyed your music" -Anna
and technical mastery:
"I really liked your music, and instruments, and your form" - Draven
to the generic:
"Thank you for the good music and about the violins and stuff" - Walter
from incredible music-inspired stories:
"Thank you, thank you, thank you I really love your music. The story I would like to share is a girl running in a mansion and falls into a weird world and she has to get out of there before taco night. She felt she was gone for months but technically only 5 mins in the real world. She finally finds a sign that says EXIT. She's finally home in time for taco night even though she was only gone for 10 mins isn't that funny. I really like this idea for a story and it's very creative" - Maria
"Thank you for coming. My story is a man who gets chased by wolves into a cave he found some gold and bought a horse and put the gold in the saddle pocket and got married wolves came back and he died" - Jai
and career advice:
"I think your quartet could go to the Olympics and play for them" - Owen
to mysterious words about Alan:
"I like the stuff you played. I like the guy who plays the Alan" - Anonymous
and perhaps our most accurate quartet depiction to date. New publicity material?:
This is the reason we love doing outreach. What an amazing excuse to hang out with creative, hilarious kids and talk about why music is awesome. Thank you to our new friends at Mt. Penn Elementary!
Hello blogging world! It's wonderful to see you again. We have just spent the past couple weeks gallavanting about China, where the "bandwidths" of many google-supported sites are "throttled", or so Nick tells me. I know nothing of these things, but I am certainly appreciating not having to load everything in basic html, for hours at a time. But there are so many incredible things about China and our experiences there that we will never forget!
First things first - food.
Our wonderful, patient, and hilarious tour managers from Wu Promotion as well as from various local agencies made sure that we always had at least 15 plates, per meal. Tiny tables were literally stacked with dishes. And the managers liked to make fun of us for not finishing everything!!!
A particularly memorable meal - lunch on our last day of tour! Beijing-style hotpot, with lamb and STOMACH and these incredible lamb-skewer-things with a kind of dry rub that would've made Texas proud. And Peking duck omgggg
We played lots of concerts too, in awesome halls -
Our first show, at Shanghai Oriental Arts Center. Do you like our outfits? They are quite new. All our checked bags got lost because of a close connection (and I mean CLOSE, I've never run so fast through an airport terminal in my life, with a string of Chinese attendants cheering me on/yelling to go faster) so we spent the morning of our first day in China shopping! <3 I was quite pleased, and so were the boys...
And this was the festival at which we were asked the question we have been waiting for, for so many years: Do we want fog machines. To be honest, this is more of a dream for the boys than for me, but I understand the gravity of the situation. To everyone's immense disappointment, the smoke didn't work out, but do not worry, the light show did. We had no idea we would be performing during the Autumn Moon Festival, but it was really an experience to remember!
Then there was this enormous backdrop-
And believe it or not, an even bigger poster of our faces in Dalian, which was terrifying. Pics of that to come, I believe they're all on Nick's camera
Ahh there are so many pictures I want to post on this thing. But another little detail - the Aeolus Quartet now lives in the Washington DC area, as we have just begun a doctoral quartet residency at the University of Maryland! I have found that a great antidote to jetlag is unpacking all the boxes in my apartment. So as I get back to that important task, I will leave you with this photo of our tour bus -
just kidding. But we did have a lot of fun riding around in these things :)
How is it that all music festivals seem to take place in the most stunning locations? Well, maybe not all... I guess we've put in our time in Topeka, etc. Not that we didn't love you, Topeka - we DID! You were just a little flat. But check out where we are right now - BANFF!!! Or to be more precise, that is Lake Louise as seen from the Trail of Six Glaciers. And here I am posing in front of an avalanche, no big deal -
oops I couldn't fit the e in at the end of "avalanche," but you know what I mean. The above photo is the work of none other than one Alan Richardson, wilderness photographer extraordinaire/ cellist in this quartet. Actually he was just taking a picture of me and some snow, but his timing is impeccable! Avalanches were falling everywhere, I guess that's what we get for hiking in summer when ice is melting off the glaciers - Banff seems to have a very different idea of summer from what we're used to down in Texas...
Aside from the extraordinary mountains, the elk stalking the practice huts, our hotel-like accommodations in an entirely creativity-oriented environment, the gourmet food, and great company til the wee hours of the morning, it is truly the mix of musicians here at the Banff Centre that are making this experience one we will never forget. Please refer back to my post gushing about the Brentano Quartet, and kindly look at the picture of Mark Steinberg - we get to work with him!!! every day!!!! And so many other incredible mentors too. We still have one more week here, and we're looking forward to getting into some Beethoven Op. 132 as well as performing the Brahms B flat sextet with Denis Brott and David Samuel! I never want to leave. More soon!
New music is the best. I'm not only referring to our "fierce championing" and "ferocious advocacy" of contemporary works, which incidentally seem to be obligatory lines in all chamber ensemble bios, but also to how incredibly refreshing it is to play new stuff! Even if the new stuff is actually Haydn, written over 200 years ago. We've been on the road with the same few pieces for a couple months now, and we are so fortunate to have three awesome new works to play (in addition to Haydn!) written by three awesome friends of ours. Two of the pieces are so new, the composers (Steve Snowden and Lexi Bryant) are still changing notes in the score each time they listen to us. The third piece, entitled "Black Bend," was written by Dan Visconti and was chosen by us as the winner of Fast Forward Austin's Call for Scores. He has had some sick ensembles play his music, and now we know why. To check out more about the fabulous new music festival (FFA) that went down last weekend, head over to the Aeolus Facebook page, where Alan has posted some links for your viewing pleasure :)
But what you're really here for is pictures. Or maybe movies? But I have to figure out how to upload those first.. We've been everywhere, and we have lots to tell you! Here are the places/events which I remembered to photograph:
This is in DC. And that is Alan's suitcase, covered in a generous layer of Herbal Essences Hello Hydration shampoo. I know that is what it's called, because I use it too. And no the bottle was not mine. A fine way to kick off our DC trip, which also included a great concert on the Concordia Chamber Music Society series, but of course I didn't take any pictures of that.
Nick enjoying an entire lobster with the fabulously amazing Nancy in Boston, at Legal Seafood. Such an incredibly warm person, and a true music lover. Oh yes, we also performed a concert in Boston with the equally warm and amazing Victor Rosenbaum presiding over the piano for the Brahms F minor Quintet. Certainly don't have any pictures of that.
And then we drove up to Vermont, where there was still a foot of snow on the ground (glad I only packed sandals) and we were to stay in THE most gorgeous bed and breakfast - the Fan House.
Sara, the lovely owner of the Fan House, actually made us breakfast on this stove. Alan tries out some commonplace kitchen implements.
LOTS OF SNOW The Barnard General Store. Incredible. Also the only actual business for miles around.
And then there was the Plowman Chamber Music Competition. We were so honored and so humbled to have been chosen for the Grand Prize, a title shared with the wonderful Akropolis Reed Quintet! We are still on cloud 9 from the whole event. And still recovering from the 14 hour car ride each way. Celebratory shots of Patron - Apparently our hotel had a deal with TGIFridays? We drank for free. No better way to celebrate a competition win :)
and we miss you. Please don't take our silence personally - it's not you, it's us. We have been BUSIER than ever rehearsing, performing, plotting our future and eating airport food, and somehow our poor blog has suffered gross neglect. This humble little journal even received a shout out in a review by Luke Quinton in the Austin American Statesman, so it's about time to live up to those "nicely-curated" standards.
First things first. Our CD is out!!!!!!! Released on Longhorn Records and distributed by Naxos, this project has been a labor of love, and we are so thankful to everyone at the university and in the studio who helped make it possible. This CD would not exist without the support of Dr. Glenn Chandler or the assistance of Kathryn Hutchison. And the album art by Nathan Russell is awesome! Please go to Amazon.com and admire it.
We are also excited to announce that we will be serving as the Quartet in Residence for the 2011 Austin Chamber Music Center Workshop! This is a very special opportunity, because the four of us trace our love of chamber music and some of our fondest childhood memories back to summer chamber music camps just like this one. The chance to be mentors and role models in such a comprehensive program as the one designed by the Austin Chamber Music Center is truly an honor. We will be performing several concerts over the course of the festival, which will be added to the 'schedule' page on our website, including a program to be shared with the beloved Tokyo Quartet! Check back for more on that in the next few weeks.
Speaking of honors... we recently met and played a concert with clarinetist Håkan Rosengren in a fundraising event for his Fayetteville Chamber Music Festival. An absolutely wonderful musician and person - definitely check him out. We performed in a beautiful turn-of-the-century home in rural Fayetteville, TX for a lively and supportive audience. This event was unique also in that it marked our first performance in conjunction with the auctioning of a live longhorn calf, among many other desirable items. We have officially achieved Texan status as a quartet :)
I have new respect for people whose work requires them to stare at a computer for hours on end. To be fair, I've only really been at this for one hour max, but that's a lot for me - come on, I'm a musician! Among my assigned duties from the last Aeolus Summit (business meeting/pizza party, held most Wednesday evenings, feel free to drop by) was the task of adding all of our concerts for the 2010-2011 season to the calendar on our website. I've barely made a dent, and I'm already taking a break :( but kudos to Nick for compiling all the concert info in the first place!
I'm learning a lot about us through this process, actually. As in, that we are playing the same program 3 days in a row in Austin in November? I hope there are enough people in this city that want to hear Schumann Piano Quintet and Bartok 4! But we are playing those concerts with the fabulous pianist Rick Rowley, so that should help. I also discovered that we are spending 4 days in a hotel in Times Square for the Chamber Music America conference, and we're giving a recital there!! Through the determination, willpower, and grant-writing skills of the amazing Kathryn Hutchison, we (via UT) are the fortunate recipients of $25,000 from the National Endowment for the Arts for the performance of American music. We just saw a copy of the grant proposal, and it is actually approx. 7 million pages long. This grant secured the NY performance, among others... about which I'm sure I would learn more, if I could only convince myself to finish updating this thing.
But more awesome things about the grant - we will be releasing a CD on the Longhorn label distributed by Naxos in the spring! All American works, and hopefully this recording process will be less grueling than the one we experienced last February. Although we certainly had the very best technical and moral support from our family at the Butler School of Music, which made the process that much more bearable! And thankfully that project has finally come to fruition - last week we had a 9 hour stint in the mastering studio preparing our Feb recording of Brahms c minor and Bartok 5 for release on Longhorn/Naxos at the end of October! With beautiful album artwork by the one and only Nathan Russell :)
Anyway, next time you click on one of those little black calendar boxes on our schedule page, that say basically the same thing as the full concert listing to the left, but in a possibly more visually stimulating format, please remember the sweat and tears that went into the operation. Thank you for taking the time to stop by, we love you!
(I just rediscovered this photo, I think it's from my surprise birthday party back in our Cleveland days. Obviously not much has changed in this ensemble)
So after one amazing and exhausting summer, we are back in Austin, TX! Well except for Greg, he's in Finland, but that's another story... the three of us here in the Lone Star State are enjoying our first real quartet break of the summer by seeing old friends, going to the beach (Alan), wakeboarding (me??), frantically completing quartet applications (Nick), and reminiscing about the incredible experiences we've had in the past couple months.
Our two weeks on Shelter Island, NY at the Perlman Music Program were the perfect way to wrap up the summer. Imagine your favorite childhood summer camp, including cookouts, bonfires on the beach, and pickup soccer games, and add to it an artist faculty of some of the most beloved musicians performing today. And the "campers" are all dedicated chamber musicians in their twenties/thirties. This uniquely supportive and inspiring atmosphere led to plenty of recreational late night chamber music reading with new friends and the faculty even after countless hours of rehearsal with our main groups. It also led to several more surprising collaborative endeavors - like the time Don Weilerstein schooled EVERYONE in basketball at the Perlmans' house. Which just goes to show that if you've mastered your coordination and timing enough to be the first violinist of the Cleveland Quartet, everything after that is cake :) Another fond memory from the Perlmans' house would be Mr. P himself manning the computer, taking us on a guided Youtube tour of Horowitz, Kreisler, Ella Fitzgerald... and this kid -
We were lucky enough to work specifically with Itzhak Perlman and Don Weilerstein during our stay at PMP. Mr. P was exacting in what he wanted, and hilarious in the way he explained it to us. Early on he recounted the story of a cruel teacher who once belittled his student by saying, "Every day you sound worse. So why today do you sound like the day after tomorrow?" From this point forth, Mr. P endeavored to assess our progress (or lack thereof) by gleefully announcing "this sounds like next Friday" or, if we were fortunate, "that could have been yesterday." Mr. Weilerstein's description of sound production and sympathetic vibration, and the necessity of awareness of sound through our bodies (including the all-important sitbones), completely revolutionized the way we played the second movement of Beethoven 18/1. And in perhaps the best news of the summer, PMP had its own private beach. And dock. This is the other best news of the summer. The incredible Toby Perlman, who created PMP through her vision of bringing together like-minded young musicians in a safe and supportive environment. What they are keeping us safe from, I have no idea, but we love it and we're not complaining...
Ok and this is beyond the best. Merry Peckham, founder of the Chamber Music Workshop at PMP, and our mentor and inspiration from our days back in Cleveland! Another highlight of the program was a series of concerts called Tutti Suonare. For a couple hours every day in the first week, we got a break from our regular quartet members and rehearsed with groups comprised of a random mix of players, each including one faculty artist. I performed the first movement of the Dvorak piano quintet with the wonderful Roger Tapping (and Christel, Yundu, and Karen!!!)
A view of PMP from the beach. I told you it looks like summer camp...
Among the many friends we made at PMP were the fabulous Ariel Quartet. We have 3/4 of them here, I don't know where Serge is, but check them out if you ever have the chance! Also check out the Linden, Vinca, and Bryant Park Quartets. They all rock. Everything we've been hauling around since June. Packing credit to Alan.
Wow this is a long post. Thanks for reading and checking in with us :)
Many of you possibly don't know it, but Nick is the one who did 90% of the work on our webpage. If you ask him about it he'll say that it was a joint effort, but really most of it is to his credit, and I think it looks pretty good. It was the product of many, many sleepless nights on his own part in Aspen last summer, and at the end of most of those nights all he had to show for it was some empty bags of Boulder Canyon potato chips.
He slugged through it, though, and we're very happy he did. The other 10% of the webpage credit goes to me, but for the most part all I can do at this point is some updating and repair work - all that we really need a second tech-savvy person to do, I suppose. I did develop a new respect for Nick's patience with Photoshop and Dreamweaver as I tried desperately to update our homepage to reflect our temporary personnel change over the summer. Here is the fruit of my labor.
Not bad. Despite my best efforts, though, I couldn't find a way to get her head to go black and white like the rest of ours. There are a lot of fancy buttons in Photoshop, but the one very simple button I had trouble finding was the "Turn thingie black and white" button. Three months of searching just wasn't enough to find it.
I never drew up the courage to put that on the homepage of our website - in your head you get the idea that the second you do something like that, some concert presenter will log on in blatant witness to your brazen lack of professionalism.
Playing with Michelle was wonderful, but it's also very good to have you back, Nick. Do show me that button when you get a chance.
I guess it's really just a snow afternoon, but we'll take it! Our duties as the young artist quartet for Bravo have come to an end, and today marks our first day of rehearsal for baroque ensembles... and by "our" I'm referring mostly to Michelle and myself, while Alan and Greg sleep in (cello parts can't easily be doubled, and let's be honest who really wrote for viola in the 17th century??) But we just received word that the wonderful people in the Bravo office have decided to cancel all rehearsing activity this afternoon, mostly because our soloist Chee-Yun is stuck in Paris for the second time - don't fly Air France - and so here I am to post lots of pictures!
and this is actually exactly where I am right now. On the patio of Michelle's and my condo :) which we are not excited about leaving on Wednesday.
Allow me to take you on a little tour of the inside also - our rehearsal space (we don't normally share just one stand between the four of us, I'm not sure what happened here)
an outdoor performance in Leadville, hiding from the elements under our massive tent. Note the tip jar - we don't get to keep that. Also the little girl on the right felt so inclined as to conduct us for Mendelssohn and Beethoven - adorable :)
still Leadville. Mt. Elbert is behind that antique store... Alan and I took a beating there on our first hike of the season (see below)
and we're not even at the summit yet.
but now we are! And we brought Bravo with us all the way up the tallest mountain in Colorado :)
More mountain pictures, because I love mountains. Up next are the twin 14ers Grays and Torreys - not at all a necessary part of the trail, but I couldn't help it
9 AM on the summit of Grays Peak. Cowering behind a makeshift wind barrier...
pants?
freezing on top of Torreys, pointing out Grays using a borrowed sign from a heavily bundled up Japanese team. They were obviously more prepared for the weather up there than we were. When packing one suitcase for the entire summer, it comes down to concert clothes versus hiking layers. Guess which won out. But back to musical things -
around 11:30 PM in a conference room at the hotel where half of the Philadelphia Orchestra stayed. We read through a huge stack of chamber music that night, rotating players except for Alan. He was the only cellist for 3 hours... haha. I studied with Yayoi, who's peeking over Noah in the pink shirt, since I was 9!
performing in the Betty Ford Alpine Gardens. An artistic shot inside the quartet by Nate, an intern with Bravo.
Greg makes tuning a viola look good. Photo courtesy of Nate, again.
after a concert at the incredible Lodge and Spa at Cordillera, with the even more incredible Eugenia Zukerman, artistic director of Bravo. We could certainly get used to warm-up rooms that are actually private hotel suites complete with platters of fresh fruit and charcuterie - thank you Cordillera (and Bravo!) We also had the honor of performing flute quintets/quartets with Eugenia yesterday - so much fun!
Time to go hang out in the hot tub, but I'll leave you with the ever fashionable Mr. and Mrs. Luce :)
