Why String Quartet?

Seriously, why?

Raphael here!

For today’s blogpost I thought I might do something rather different and take a step back. I’d like to take some time to look at the essence of our work and ruminate on some of the bigger questions at the heart of music and chamber music in particular—questions that are perhaps taken for granted by performers and audiences alike! Personally, I find that it behooves me greatly to wonder at and consider the implications of what we do… after all, why would we slave away in rehearsal getting the 4th movement of Beethoven’s Opus 59 No 3 to a terminal velocity of 160 beats per minute, or agonise over the intonation in a section of Caroline Shaw’s “Plan and Elevation”, or drive for hours just so an audience of less than 20 can hear our cellist play the castanets (true story!)?

That people would get their friends together to play string quartets or piano trios, should study for years in an endeavour to make the works of masters old and new come alive, and could even scratch out a living doing it, seems simultaneously obvious and opaque in a curiously odd way. Most performers begin the journey of honing their craft before their brains have developed the synapses to handle geometry, and by the time calculus rears its ugly head their aspirations for music college have probably already concretised. This has the effect of creating a certain class of artist for whom this kind of music has and always will be a fact of life. And despite every generation’s cultural climate, discerning audiences members such as yourselves still come out to experience that which by every economic metric should be little more than a fringe pastime.

Surely, we must do it because it means something.