Lot 49: Greg Beaver's blog - Music

Transporting a cello: buy a seat? check it? Definitive answers on how to fly with a cello

nospam@example.com (Greg Beaver) — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 22:17:00 -0700

One of the perennial problems of travelling with a cello is how to transport it. I have been flying with my cello since 1993, and have many experiences with both checking the instrument and with buying a seat for it. This post will answer those burning questions of what to do to transport your instrument safely from one point to another. First, let's start with the only guaranteed unsuccessful strategy I have encountered:

Don't mail your cello

Although large shops such as Shar can marshall the resources to ship instruments, they do so in very different circumstances from what you will be able to do on your own. The few people I know who have shipped their instruments wound up with multi-hundred to thousand dollar repair bills, which was actually a lucky position to be in. The risk of outright destruction is too great.

When to check a cello?

If your instrument is not a very valuable instrument that can be easily replaced if it is utterly destroyed, then it is probably unwise to buy a seat for the instrument. The hassles of buying a seat are going to outweigh the benefits, I guarantee it.

When not to check a cello?

If your cello is very fine, very valuable, or very difficult to replace with an equivalent instrument either in the value that insurance will pay for it, or in any price range, then you should not check your cello. Here are a list of things that can and have gone wrong with both flight cases and regular luggage:

lost luggage - permanently lost luggage happens more often than you would think
destroyed luggage - this speaks for itself, no?
a destroyed instrument inside a pristine, undamaged case
delayed luggage stored outside in sub-zero temperatures overnight
if you're counting on being able to carry the instrument on board because it will fit into the overhead, be aware that the airline can change the type of aircraft with no notice

The last point should be enough to dissuade even the most confident traveler from checking a valuable cello. If you have a flight that transfers, and your flight is canceled due to weather, airlines very rarely allow you to retrieve luggage from the secured area, and it sits in un-climate controlled storage areas for the entire night. This will render a cello to be far more fragile, and if you survive the night without a heart attack from the stress, your broken cello upon retrieval due to its extra fragility from exposure to the elements will push you over the edge.

OK, I'm going to check my cello, what do I need to know?

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Gearing up for a first Beethoven cycle

nospam@example.com (Greg Beaver) — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 22:13:03 -0700

This year, beginning in December, the Chiara Quartet will undertake our first Beethoven cycle. This comes a year or two before we had planned to do it, but we were offered the chance by Music in Deerfield in Massachusetts, and a quick survey of our repertoire proved that it would be more than possible, as we already have more than half of the quartets solidly in our repertoire. After little juggling of logistics, we committed to 3 concerts this season, starting in December, and 3 next season. We will also be performing the complete cycle in Cambridge, MA at Harvard, and in Lincoln, Nebraska as part of our inaugural Chiara String Quartet concert series at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Once we had the dates in place, the first big question is what order to play them in. Our ordering is as follows:

Concert 1:

Op. 135 in F Major
Op. 18 No. 4 in C Minor
Op. 59 No. 1 in F Major

Concert 2:

Op. 18 No. 3 in D Major
Op. 132 in A Minor
Op. 59 No. 3 in C Major

Concert 3:

Op. 18 No. 1 in F Major
Op. 95 in F Minor
Op. 127 in E Flat Major

and the following season:

Concert 4:

Op. 18 No. 5 in A Major
Op. 59 No. 2 in E Minor
Op. 130 (with revised finale) in B Flat Major

Concert 5:

Op. 74 in E Flat Major
Op. 18 No. 2 in G Major
Op. 131 in C Sharp Minor

Concert 6:

Op. 18 No. 6 in B Flat Major
Op. 130 (with Grosse Fuge) in B Flat Major

There are several obvious choices going on in this ordering. First is that most concerts contain a quartet from each of the three periods of Beethoven's life. A late quartet sits in every possible concert slot, as does a middle quartet. We will play Op. 130 twice in its entirety with the two possible finales, and the entire cycle ends with the Grosse Fuge. Putting together this order also splits up the pieces we don't yet have in our repertoire between the two seasons. Most concerts mix up major and minor keys as well.

How, you might ask, does one prepare for such a collosal undertaking?

The majority of our preparation for this cycle predates the initial request for us to play one. We've been a full-time professional quartet since 2000, and so this will coincide with our 10th season. Individually, we've played a ton of chamber music, and a lot of Beethoven as part of that.

I first heard a Beethoven cycle live when I was 10 years old, and the Juilliard Quartet performed one at the Wharton Center in East Lansing, Michigan. I had only been playing the cello for 3 years, and so my memory consists of the opening chords of Op. 127, and the hairy legs of the quartet members peeping out between their socks and tuxedo pantlegs. What? I was 10 years old, give me a break. If you haven't heard the Op. 127, its opening is one of the most memorable things Beethoven wrote, so you must come hear us play it live in our final concert this spring. Becca's father was in the Concord Quartet and she literally grew up listening to live Beethoven cycles.

One of the first quartets I played in the "Shürtzaut" quartet (a group of 4 13-year old boys who refused to tuck in their shirts) was the second movement of Op. 18 No. 4, and this was one of the pieces that I played under the coaching of Rostislav Dubinsky of Borodin Quartet fame the following year in his Quadro-quartet at IU String Academy. When the Chiara Quartet was formed at Musicorda in 1993, we played Op. 95 and had a chance to play the second movement with Arnold Steinhardt in his masterclass when our original violinist Rachel was sick. The following year, we coached Op. 59 No. 2 very intensely with Norman Fischer of Concord Quartet fame (and soon to be my teacher at Rice University). That same year, a group of students decided to practice the late quartets for a week and then to read through them. While at Rice, Jonah and I learned Op. 59 No. 1 with Paul Katz of Cleveland Quartet fame as our coach. At Tanglewood in 1999, I played Op. 127 with a group that coached with both Robert Mann and Raphael Hillyer of Juilliard Quartet fame, and this was one of the pieces with which the Chiara Quartet made our Alice Tully debut in 2005. Op. 59 No. 3 was one of the pieces with which we made our Carnegie Hall debut the following year, and one of the pieces that helped us win a prize at the Borciani Competition the same year. Op. 18 No. 3 was one of the pieces we played in the year we won first at the Fischoff Competition. While graduate students at Juilliard, Jonah, Becca, Anna Elashvili and I played the Op. 130 with the Grosse Fuge on her graduation recital after coaching with Robert Mann.

Even with a list this long, the preparation for a cycle is more than just learning the quartets. I played all of the sonatas and variations for cello in 2000 in New York (and will repeat the performance of all the sonatas this year). Julie, Noori and I have been listening to Richard Goode's recording of all the piano sonatas, and in my orchestral days, I played all of the symphonies except for Number 8. We've read biographies of Beethoven, looked at actual manuscripts at Beethovenhaus in Bonn as well as facsimiles online, and heard cycle recordings by the Juilliard, Emerson, Takacs, and many recordings by the Concord, Cleveland, Tokyo as well as performances by Brentano, Borromeo, Biava, Miro, Pacifica and other quartets I'm sure I'm forgetting, as well as student performances of many of the works.

We are extremely excited to embark on this monumental journey and hope that you will join us in the first performance at Harvard on Wednesday, December 2 in Paine Hall, or at Smith College in Northampton on Saturday December 5 in Sweeney Concert Hall on the Music in Deerfield chamber music series. If you're in Nebraska, you can hear us threepeat the performance on Sunday, December 13 in the Sheldon Art Gallery at 7:30 PM

How to manage all that noise? Where PHP development and chamber music rehearsal meet

nospam@example.com (Greg Beaver) — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 17:54:34 -0700

Lately, there have been many well-intentioned but I would contend misguided ideas proposed to handle noise on public programmer mailing lists. The premise is that in fact there are very important messages being drowned out in a chorus of irrelevant messages from ill-informed developers. Warnings of inefficiencies have been tossed about quite a bit as the curse of "bike shedding."

To understand what they mean by "bike shedding," one must know the bike shed parable. Once upon a time, a group of people got together to build a nuclear reactor to power the city. Everyone in the town said "great, we need more power," and so they got to work designing the plant. Everything was going great, the design of the reactor sailed by until one day, one of the citizens said "hey, let's build a bike shed for the workers so they don't have to come to work in cars and can get exercise." Everyone agreed until an argument broke out over whether to paint the shed blue or red. Eventually, the whole process broke down, and the plant was never built because they couldn't choose a color to paint the bike shed. The moral of the story: everyone agrees on the complex important things, but the process breaks down over arguments about irrelevant details.

I think we can all agree that this is a tragic parable, illustrating what happens when the process for decision-making breaks down.

When there is a problem of signal-to-noise ratio on a mailing list, the problem has to do with the process for accepting public input, I completely agree with this. However, I am troubled by the implication that having unmoderated mailing lists is the intrinsic problem with open source that must be solved. There is a crucial balance between rewarding quality and being open to the outsider that is the life blood of open source. You could even think of it as the "affirmative action" of the programming world: we recognize that amateur programmers who do not come from the establishment of the temples of programming in academic computer science departments or even computing careers, may have ideas that are better than the most learned highest karma achiever.

For my musician reader: Open source thrives on meritocracy: the idea that those who can do junk have more influence than those who can't do as much junk. Karma is the thing with which these individuals are rewarded. Only those with karma are able to actually make changes to the source code. It doesn't matter who you are, or what your background is, if you demonstrate good coding and community, you get karma.

String quartet rehearsal is similar, the best ideas get more weight regardless of whether the person who has them is playing the melody.

Why am I talking about string quartet rehearsal in a post about moderated programmer mailing lists? I come from a profession (professional chamber music) where "karma" is a fluid object, and unlike the programming world tends to break down when we attempt to nail it down. My string quartet has found that rather than try to decide who will be "the decider" for tough decisions, it's not just friendlier, but is also far more efficient to devote our individual energies to two essential things:

always try to find the bigger picture
always try to understand and respect everyone else's crackpot stupid ideas

Sometimes they are crackpot, but most of the time, the reason they just seemed crackpot because they were outside the boundaries of our collective imaginations.

An example: in our first years together, we occasionally would get into endless arguments in my quartet about whether to play a particular musical section faster or slower (PHP developers: think endless namespace separator arguments). After a long time of arguing about this, it usually turned out that we were asking the wrong question, until one day we would find the right question, which was something like "how long are the phrases?" (PHP developers: the right question turned out to be "how do we solve the ambiguity between static methods and namespaced functions?"). After finding the right question, we stopped arguing nearly as much, and the music sounded much better after we all re-adjusted our thinking.

This illustrates an important distinction: the question of how fast to play was not an irrelevant "bike shedding" detail, it was a crucial part of the solution. We still had to choose a speed to play, just as the nuclear power plant people still would need a place to put their bikes. By changing the question from "How fast?" to "How long is the phrase?" we were actually solving the question of what color to paint the bike shed at the same time we solved the question of how to design access to the nuclear reactor, not ignoring it.

The best solution is for those with the most karma to use this power to redirect unfruitful arguments towards larger questions that can lead to a more natural solution to the problem, not to limit external input and even conflict.

Perhaps the principal designers of the ill-fated hypothetical nuclear power plant would have done better to instead suggest that the bike shed be integrated into the reactor building. This would protect the bikes from the elements, and also require any bike thieves to go through security to get to the bikes - and eliminated the question of what color to paint the shed entirely without ignoring it.

It takes hard work and more than a little gut-wrenching conflict to resolve a truly important, difficult problem, and I for one, am willing to tolerate a little noise to find that gem which would otherwise be missed.

Music, PEAR, phar, namespaces and Macs. Oh my!

nospam@example.com (Greg Beaver) — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 21:00:17 -0700

Why the tri-partite title? I've been silent for a while on the blog, but the title sums up my life for the past several months. What have I been doing? Aside from some crazy music work learning a blisteringly difficult Elliot Carter String Quartet No. 4 as well as Steve Reich's Different Trains, Bartok's 6th Quartet, bringing back Korngold 3rd Quartet, learning Carter's Figment for solo cello, and performing Bach's 5th Suite for Unaccompanied Cello for the first time, I've also been pretty active in coding. I acquired a new Macbook Pro with VMWare Fusion running Windows XP and Ubuntu, and it has made development super-easy. I also put in a significant effort on the phone getting Barack his electoral vote in the Omaha area, which seems to have paid off. So, here's the long version of what I've been doing.

Music and Macs

first the music

The past month has seen my time consumed learning Elliot Carter's 4th String Quartet for the 100th birthday thing in Boston. Although I have not learned the others, a few veterans have reported that it is the most difficult. I certainly found it to be the most difficult thing I've ever learned by a long shot. It took me almost 15 hours of work to be able to play the first page (only 15 measures of music) at 3/4 of the printed tempo, and the piece is 35 pages in the cello part. To contrast, page 35 of the 10 Celebrated Mozart Quartet cello part is the third movement of 6th string quartet in the book. Carter 4th's cello part is as long as 6 Mozart quartet cello parts. However, it is shorter than some of the 4 page Mozart quartets, because it is frickin fast and there are lots and lots of notes. It is the most holy s*** hard piece I've ever learned, and for a while, I was scared it just wasn't going to be possible.

In addition, one of Carter's big compositional inventions is the metric modulation in which a tempo change has a distinct rhythmic relationship. He uses some pretty normal ones in the first movement (the 16th note becomes the new triplet), but the other movements have fun ones such as the 16th note becoming the new septuplet. Because most of my part is written in septuplets, this can be difficult to do. Speeding up septuplets so that you fit 7 into what used to be the space of 6 septuplets is not an easy thing to learn at all.

...then the mac

...unless you have a metronome that can do the metric modulation. We had been using a web-based metronome to plug into our studio's stereo to rehearse, because it had a more pleasing beat than any of our metronomes have, and it occurred to me that I could probably pretty easily write a metronome that is capable of doing metric modulations on my new Macbook Pro.

So, I took it upon myself to learn Objective-C and the Cocoa framework in Xcode to write a metronome. It took me just over a day to learn Objective-C; it's very easy for a C coder to pick up, and the syntax is pretty simple. Learning Cocoa fully took quite a bit longer, but after 3 days I had a working metronome that could do metric modulations (http://chiaraquartet.net/ChiaraMetronome1.0.0.dmg). It had several flaws, not the least of which was the inability to insert a measure group, no way to save your work, and some odd behavior on the first beat (sometimes it is late and fast).

After a few more days of digging, I had figured out most of the quirks (and discovered bindings and Core Data, which simplified things) and had the interface greatly simplifed (http://chiaraquartet.net/ChiaraMetronome1.2.2.dmg). I added the ability to start at any measure in the piece, and to have lead-in measures (which allow you to start the metronome, sit down, find the beat, and then start playing).

Then, I discovered document-based Core Data, which allowed saving files, resulting in the next generation (http://chiaraquartet.net/ChiaraMetronome2.0.0.dmg).

Finally, not to leave an unturned stone, I added the final features, the ability to specify whether a beat is accented, beated or silent, which allows implementation of uneven compound meters (like 5/8), and the ability to accelerate or decelerate tempo, and we have the final version http://chiaraquartet.net/ChiaraMetronome3.0.0.dmg. This version contains 3 sample metronomes, the complete Elliot Carter 4th quartet we used to practice the tempo changes, a sample demonstrating accelerando/ritardando, and a sample demonstrating how the metronome can be used to practice complex polyrhythms like 6 against 7.

In my potentially humble opinion, the metronome is my crowning glory as a programmer, it is incredible for learning complex tempo relationships for composers like Carter and Bartok who call for it. It's also important to note that this metronome should NEVER be used for learning music by composers such as Brahms or Mozart. If I hear of anyone using it for that, I will hunt you down and make you listen to Beethoven 9 with your eyelids peeled back watching Teletubbies.

Short feature list:

free, released as a beta with no implied license or warranty. I still own the copyright, so you can't use it in your own programming projects or sell it without infringing on the copyright. You can use it for your own practicing, and I will eventually release the source under an open-source friendly license once I have time to research the options.
Please send me any metronome files you create, I'll start a public repository that people can download them from
requires Mac OS X Leopard (version 10.5.0) or newer
universal binary
relative tempo slider can be used to practice under tempo and click up the metronome, preserving tempo relationships at tempo changes
ability to program in endless tempo (0 bars) or a limited number of bars of a tempo
ability to do compound meters, both even and uneven
ability to do accelerando/ritardando, including ones that cross tempo group boundaries using the tempo calculator
ability to start and end accelerando/ritardando mid-bar. No support for mid-beat start/stop, but this can be simulated by doubling the number of beats and making the mid-beats silent. For example: instead of 4 beats at 60 bpm, choose 8 beats, and make 2,4,6 and 8 silent, with double the tempo, 120 bpm, then start the accel on beat 4 to start on the and of 2.
complete undo/redo support
ability to split up a tempo group, insert a new tempo group, or copy a set of tempo groups and paste them (copy button)
ability to play only a limited set of tempo groups, simply shift-click or command-click the tempo groups. This can be used, for instance, to skip a repeat in practicing.
ability to accent all downbeats with a simple click.
start at any bar in the piece.
lead-in bars to help prepare tempo prior to playing.

PEAR

Today, I upgrade pear.chiaraquartet.net to the latest version, 0.19.0, which Brett Bieber has been working hard to perfect. The look is a bit cleaner, and I also replaced the defunct Crtx_Frontend_Chiara (or whatever it was called) with the newly minted Chiara_Pear_Server_Frontend_Web which is a direct port over of the old frontend with bugfixes and visual tweaks.

PEAR and phar

A high priority for PEAR is minting its next-generation installer, Pyrus. Pyrus is based on PHP 5.3+, and thus I expended a tremendous amount of energy on the new phar extension,which will be enabled by default in PHP 5.3. The phar extension provides several must-have features for Pyrus:

ability to run out-of-the-box applications without installing or extracting them (a la Java's jar) in zip, tar or native phar file format
ability to create data archives in tar or zip format and convert between them
ability to automatically handle oddities of running an application inside an uncompressed file
web-based applications without extraction

I'm very pleased this will be built into PHP 5.3, it cuts out oodles of code from Pyrus, and will significantly affect both its performance and memory footprint.

PEAR and namespaces. Oh MY!

Also important for PEAR2 is making it easier to work with the names, so I've been fighting in the namespace wars. For a while there, it was looking like namespaces would go the way they had in the PHP 5 beta cycle: to the trash can. With a little bit of work, we found a solution no one is 100% happy with, but having tried out several possibilities, I must say the solution we chose is something we can be proud of. There have been many complainers, but the irony I have seen is that most assert they never planned to use namespaces in the first place, which begs the question: why flap your trap if you have no plan to use the thing? In any case, you know where I stand on the issue. I wrote the new manual as well as the first draft of the patch that made it possible to end the bickering on internals. A big thanks to Dmitry Stogov and Stanislav Malyshev for their patience, and especially persistence in working out the solution. Also thanks to many others who fielded opinions on-list, on IRC, and through private email. Anyone who contributed a real concern rationally and sometimes forcefully deserves credit for the final implementation, and time will prove that it is a very good one for those who need it.

I am, of course, referring to the now infamous decision to use the backslash (\) as the namespace separator in PHP's implementation of namespaces. I won't go into the rationale, except to say that PHP, unlike other languages, implements a very loose autoload implementation, which makes it impossible to do the most common solution to resolving a name conflict between a static method and a namespaced function - disallow that. In other words, it's not possible to detect the conflict unless autoload is called on every potential namespaced function call, which introduces a potentially exponential hidden performance loss. As Stanislav so eloquently put it, name conflicts have not caused major websites to go down, but performance issues have. Thus, anything that calls autoload where it may be unnecessary is an unacceptable solution, and the only way to safely handle the ambiguity is to eliminate it.

That is what using the backslash does, because the syntax is different between a namespaced function call and a static method. Complain or ridicule if you'd like, the rest of us will simply shut up and code.

This decision has several other benefits too, including the ability to audit someone else's code and figure out what you should grep for, a namespace or a class name. This also translates into better autocomplete in future IDEs, and so on.

Wrap up

So, it's been a long blog post, but a lot has happened in the past several months, and it's time to get cracking on the future. More will follow as time allows.

Is chamber music dead?

nospam@example.com (Greg Beaver) — Sat, 23 Jun 2007 09:24:42 -0700

No. At least, we haven't seen any evidence of this assertion.

However, Anne Midgette of the New York Times wrote a very interesting article encompassing her own opinion of the issue. For the article, she interviewed several people with varying perspectives on the issue including the CEO of Chamber Music America, the artistic directors of Chamber Music at Lincoln Center, several concert presenters, a few young performers and composers, and me . One of the most striking parts of the article is where she documents different people's definitions of the term "Chamber Music" itself - it really does seem like nobody has a clue how to successfully define the term, but is this really any different from other genres? Terms like impressionism, pointillism, expressionism all have vast gray areas where renowned experts disagree on what falls within which category. Is Rock music Pop? Is Hip Hop Pop? Is Funk Hip Hop? You could work yourself into a frothy academic frenzy trying to taxonify art properly and still end up with no real definition that everyone can agree upon.

Her main point is that the term "chamber music" is in fact a huge barrier to audiences appreciating chamber music at all. This is an interesting idea, but I find that it is not entirely accurate. The truth is that most people in the United States have no associations whatever with chamber music, negative or positive. She suggests that calling chamber music something else might reinvigorate the field. To me, this seems to be a decent attempt at a new direction, but I doubt that would have any significant effect on either the profession or on audience size at concerts. The content of the concert, the energy level of the group, the focus of the concert (is it a shut-up-and-sit-down event or can you eat dinner while listening to late Beethoven?) are far more significant than what you call it.

All of these nit-picking concerns aside, I am very happy to see an article challenging some of the odd conventions that exist in the world of classical chamber music, and am honored that we were included in the examples of people looking for other ways of doing what we do. It's very exciting to be able to play anything we would play in a concert hall in a club - dumbing down isn't even a consideration when we're putting together our set lists (set list - you might call them "halves" of a traditional concert, and you'd have the same basic idea. Each set is one half of what we end up playing in the club, as we usually play 2 sets).

As an example of one of the tiny things that we can do which is not possible in a concert hall is when we play in clubs, there are no rules about what we can wear on stage. It's quite literally a dream come true for me, as I have always found that suits and tuxedos are designed explicitly to prevent blood from reaching the brain and to prevent audience members from feeling comfortable. We've done our best within the conventions of the concert hall to relax this feeling, but in the concert hall there is no easy way to duplicate the freedom of just being yourself you have when playing in a club.

Rostropovich, the greatest cellist of the 20th century passes

nospam@example.com (Greg Beaver) — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 10:00:03 -0700

I awoke yesterday morning to the radio and was stunned to hear of the death of Mtislav Rostropovich, who for me was unquestionably the greatest cellist to play in the past century. His death was not an unexpected one, as he was 80 years old, but the sense of loss is still palpable. I feel as if I lost a close friend.

I first heard Rostropovich live in concert when I was 8 years old. He travelled to perform at the Wharton Center in East Lansing, Michigan. My parents could only afford the cheapest tickets, and so we sat literally in the last row of the upper balcony. My Dad brought a pair of binoculars so that we could actually see what he was doing. I had been playing the cello for only a year at the time, but I still remember vividly watching him perform the "Dance of the Elves" by Popper as an encore. We were so far away from him, his bow was already a third of the way to the tip when the sound would reach my seat! Soon after, I discovered his recording of the Dvorak Concerto and Tchaikovsky Rococo Variations with Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic. This recording, made in 1969, was and is my single favorite recording of anything. There is a moment right at the end of the 3rd movement of the Dvorak written shortly after Dvorak's sister had died which features a wistful, almost nostalgic sense of peace and pain. The cello climbs up through 3 phrases to a high B trill. Right after this moment, Rostropovich creates the most incredible sense of loss between the high B and the following note, an A, that I have ever heard or imagined. It is quite simply the most incredible moment of all Western music, recorded or live, that I have ever experienced, and there are no other cellists who even come close to the understanding of the universe of emotion in that simple whole step shift.

My contact with Rostropovich continued to be abstract until I attended the Tanglewood Music Center in 1998. That summer, at the very end, Rostropovich gave a masterclass. I was selected along with two other cellists to play for him. For my repertoire, I chose to perform the first movement of Prokofiev's Symphonie Concertante, a piece written for Rostropovich. In the class, I was very surprised to see that Rostropovich was a very short man. On stage, he looks to be at least 6 feet tall because of the tremendous energy and intensity with which he performs. I had worked on the Prokofiev with two different teachers, Anthony Elliott at Aspen the previous summer, and Norman Fischer at Rice University, where I had just completed a Bachelor's in Music, and so had studied the markings in the score quite diligently, choosing to change some of the bowings in the effort to get better projection. The first thing Rostropovich said was that I needed to play the bowings in the score, that splitting them was like bad breathing in singing. Fortunately, I had learned the piece with the original bowings, and was able to immediately play with them.

Some people think Rostropovich's sound is due to his possession of the most incredible Stradivarius cello, the "Duport" Strad, but he handily disproved this theory in the masterclass. Shortly after starting, Rostropovich walked on stage, grabbed my cello and began to play the Prokofiev, talking the whole time about what he was looking for in bowing. Standing a few feet away from him, I was amazed to hear the Rostropovich sound coming out of my cello! I most decidedly do not possess a Strad or anything near to one, having had the opportunity to play on a Strad for a month while studying at Juilliard.

After instructing me on how to bow the piece, Rostropovich sat down at the piano and began to play - from memory - the orchestral reduction of the Symphonie Concertante to accompany my attempt to absorb his suggestions. After my half hour session was over with him, he grabbed me in a big bear hug and gave me a scruffy kiss on the neck, as was his custom, posed for a photograph and then signed my copy of the Prokofiev score. Unfortunately, the photograph did not turn out, but the score is one of my most treasured possessions.

It was the pinnacle of my life as a student. After 13 years of having my life as a musician and as a human affected by this man, I finally was able to play for him and it was much more than I had hoped for.

I only wish that I could have had the opportunity to be in the right place at the right time to perhaps have studied with him more extensively

What's it really like doing club tours?

nospam@example.com (Greg Beaver) — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 22:20:00 -0700

Sunday, we returned from a mini-tour of Kansas clubs, playing at The Brick in Kansas City, The Artichoke in Wichita, and finally the Emma Chase Cafe in Cottonwood Falls. Clubs? A string quartet in clubs? Yes, you're reading correctly. Since this summer, we have been planning to blaze a new path, presenting performances in bars, galleries, clubs, and other spaces more intimate than the typical concert hall. With the help of our new manager, we began our club tours with appearances in Lincoln Nebraska (our home base), Brooklyn, Houston, Manhattan (NY), Massachusetts, and just this past week, Kansas.

Why play in clubs? We have noticed that performances in smaller spaces tend to be much more vibrant for the audience. In addition, by playing in spaces not normally associated with a string quartet, we plan to test our theory that this music is really great even for people who actively avoid listening to "classical music" or who at least have never attended concerts, including a younger variety of audience member than is traditionally seen in a concert hall. In short, we hope to show that in fact, classical music in general (and string quartet in particular) is not just alive, but in fact needs no "dumbing down" in order to appeal directly to what most classical-minded folks refer to as an "uneducated audience." Uneducated audience - what an unfortunate term! It implies both that the music is too complex to simply like it, and that the people listening are too dumb or lazy to make the proper effort to grasp the complexity.

So, to our great surprise and delight, we have had nothing but positive feedback from our audiences, and even from the press. At the Brick, the audience was about 130 people, packed in with barely any standing room, and they screamed after we finished each movement. Jonah (our violist) told the audience we were testing the waters bringing string quartet into a club, and they literally roared, one guy shouting "FINALLY!!"

For our performances in clubs, we like to split up multi-movement pieces and re-formulate the movements in an order that interests us, so that we can create a more dynamic sense of expectation, a sense of "whoa, what will they do next?" This also banishes the traditional taboo against clapping between movements, something that typically turns off a neophyte at a classical concert. It's hard to enjoy a performance when you're worried about liking it "too much" or liking it in the wrong way. Also, with different acoustical challenges at each club, we re-assess our set list at the door, sometimes dropping movements that may be too quiet, sometimes re-ordering pieces so that the music is even more intimate than our original plan. The idea of choosing what to play onstage or even the same day as the concert is completely foreign to the classical world, where presenters ask for complete program information a year in advance or more, in order to advertise a complete season to their subscribers.

At the Brick, we were scheduled to go on at about 9 PM, but the warmup band, the Jeff Harshbarger Trio, a jazz group that mysteriously featured four musicians for this gig, didn't start playing until about 9:15ish, so we grabbed a table in the back of the bar. As we sat, more and more people arrived, ranging from gray-haired people who looked a bit frightened to 30somethings clearly comfortable with the surroundings. I even played a game of Judge Dredd pinball on the bar's pinball machine, something decidedly absent from the backstage of Carnegie Hall. Another big difference between Carnegie Hall and the clubs we've played in thus far: Carnegie Hall has a backstage area. We have to just run on stage and begin playing in clubs.

After Jeff's trio finished their half hour set, we went up on stage, and set up. The Brick has a sound guy who is quite good, and so he set up some nice microphones and we did a sound check. 4 speaking mics, and 2 central mics for the quartet sound, so that it picks up a more accurate blend than individual instrument mics. In the future, when funds allow, we plan to purchase special instrument mics that fit on the bridge and take them with us, but the Brick's setup was good for now. It's very weird to do all of the backstage preparation on stage, but the audience is used to this kind of thing in a bar.

We began with the introduction to Jefferson Friedman's 3rd Quartet, a great quartet that we commissioned with help from Brooklyn Friends of Chamber Music in 2005, and premiered in New York's Alice Tully Hall. This movement is spectacular for opening a club set because it opens with a 30 second crescendo from nothing and then launches into an intense 2-minute ride. For the rest of the first set, we played Mozart's K. 465 first movement followed by Kansas City-based Zhou Long's "Song of the Ch'in" (1982), then we played the "Romanze" from Brahms's C Minor String Quartet, "Chasqui" from Gabriela Frank's Leyendas, an Andean Walkabout, and finally a cover tune. The cover is Prince's "Go Crazy" arranged by Jeff Louie for quartet. It's a fun tune, and is another experiment for us. After a short break, we played the complete Icefield Sonnets by Pierre Jalbert, a 3 movement work based on poetry of Anthony Hawley (who happens to be our first violinist Becca's husband). Before each movement, Becca read the corresponding poem. To close off the set, we played the last movement of the Brahms C Minor quartet. The crowd demanded an encore, and so we obliged with the slow movement from the Mozart K. 465 quartet.

Afterwards, we hung around to get our free beers and talked with Jeff Harshbarger and to a few audience members who stayed around. This wasn't the kind of conversation you have after a classical concert. You know, "where did you study" "why did you choose to play that new piece, it is very interesting" "do you know X quartet?" No, we talked about where you can find the best barbecue in KC, hilarious band moments and had a generally great time.

The next morning, after a great lunch at Arthur Bryant's, we drove to Wichita. We weren't expecting much, as one audience member had quipped that Wichita is like Detroit without the charm, but it turned out to be a nice town, not unlike other midwest towns we've played in (South Bend, IN, Peoria, IL, etc.) Around dinner time we headed over to the Artichoke. Unlike the Brick, if 130 people had tried to fit into the Artichoke, there would be no room for oxygen. The Artichoke is small, and fits the stereotype of a classic, heartwarming dive where you might expect there to be an occasional fight, all in good fun, of course. The sign outside reads "FRI CHIARA. GREEN BEER ON TAP SAT." There is a speaker with 4 cables we can "plug into" which almost qualifies as a sound system. We decide to go acoustic for this night.

For about 3/4 of the club dates, we have used no amplification at all for our instruments, but this is the first time we've not used speaking mics. We started with the Friedman as usual. Unlike the Brick, the TV is still on, showing a basketball game of Kansas State, although the volume is muted. The hood fans in the kitchen are making enough noise to be disturbing, and we are squeezed into the corner with not quite enough room to play. My goal in life for the next few hours will be not to accidentally kill Jonah or Julie with my bow. Mid-set, we realize that the Zhou Long, which is ethereal and quiet for much of the movement, will not work, and so we switch out our set list onstage. This first set becomes Friedman, Mozart, Leyendas "Chasqui", Brahms C Minor first movement, and the Prince. Backstage, we rework the second set, so that it starts with Leyendas "Tarqueada" followed by the second Icefield Sonnet "Glass is a Place," then the last movement of Brahms's C Minor quartet. For an encore, we play Leyendas "Coqueteos."

The bar's owner Pat, who wears a gray T-shirt with "USMC" in black letters, appears right before the first set. He makes a terse but warm announcement midway saying the cover is $5 and goes to help pay for our gas money, and aren't we a great band? We've never been referred to as a "band" but it feels like the right thing, even as we launch into a movement of Brahms. Pictures at the show were taken by Wichita-based photographer Bruce Ward.

After the show, the audience of about 25 gives us a standing ovation, and many come up to talk with us. One woman insists that classical music is in fact dying because it is so snobby, but that we are keeping it alive with what we are doing, and that the Prince was beautiful, beautiful music. I even meet a cellist who is looking at going into music as a career and may audition for UNL where we teach. He stood behind the bar, just over my shoulder for the entire second set watching the music intently. We find out from our spies that in fact the feeling of needing to play louder was an illusion, the kitchen hood fan noise did not transmit beyond the corner where we were playing. What a relief! When getting the cover money from the owner, he tells us that two audience members insisted on paying $50 rather than the $5 cover charge, another nice surprise.

The next morning, we set out for Cottonwood Falls, a little town in the Flint Hills of Kansas. The drive is gorgeous, we took the scenic byway 177 off of the Kansas Turnpike. Our hotel, the Prairie Fire Inn and Spa, is a one-story drive-up 10-room hotel that is very quaint, but inexplicably has wireless internet. Times are a-changing.

When we head over to the Emma Chase Cafe, the proprietor, Sue, is ready for us, and serves up a marvelous meal for dinner. The menu is a choice of either Irish Stew or Corned Beef, although she makes a delicious baked potato with vegetables for Becca as a special accomodation (Becca's a vegetarian). Sue, like many of the people we met, is truly salt-of-the-earth, down home, good people. One of the patrons asks us in a thick accent if we're the orchestra playing tonight, and tells us how excited he is to hear us.

The cafe seats maybe 35 people, but we've heard that over 100 tickets were sold 3 weeks ago. They mystery is solved when she takes us next door to the venue we will perform in. 130 seats or so are arranged in a semi-circle around our chairs. There will be no food or drink served while we perform. Immediately we realize that this not only is this much closer to a concert hall than a rock club, the audience is used to "pickin'" rather than rock or jazz, and so we re-arrange our set lists. For the first half, we will begin with the Mozart first movement, followed by the Zhou Long, then the second movement of the Mozart, and we'll play the entire Icefield Sonnets and finish with "Chasqui" from Leyendas. For the second half, we'll begin with the complete Brahms C minor, and finish with "Coqueteos" from Leyendas.

As we warm up an hour and a half before the show, more than half of the audience shows up to ensure they will get good seats. By the time we finish our warm-up, it is just 6:30, but 3/4 of the seats are occupied. At 7:30, Sue heads out and warms up the crowd, asking folks where they drove in from. There are audience members from Kansas City (2 hour drive), Lawrence (2 hour drive), Topeka (1 hour) and all of the surrounding communities. After her warm introduction, we played the first set.

Becca and Anthony have brought along their 2 1/2-year old, Oriana, on this trip. The plan tonight was for Anthony to read the poetry before each of the Icefield Sonnets movements, but right after he introduces the piece to the audience, Oriana, who was sleeping in the car, woke up. Becca stood in as his stunt double, and we played the first two sonnets. For the third sonnet, Anthony walked up with Oriana in one arm and his book in the other, and without missing a beat, read the poem.

In the second set, after we finished the last movement of the Brahms, the audience leapt to its feet. Julie leaned over to me and said "let's finish it now," meaning "let's not play the Leyendas." Talk about improvisatory last minute set changes! For an encore, Becca played "O Danny Boy" in honor of St. Patrick's Day.

After we finished, the audience, most of whom had patiently waited almost 2 hours before the show, cleared out in less than 3 minutes (it was getting dark, time to go home and go to sleep), and we went over to the Emma Chase for hot chocolate.

3 days, and 3 completely different universes, all within the state we call Kansas. On all three nights, we didn't make nearly as much money as we can make playing in a concert hall, but there was something magical. The audience seemed to find a deeper and more exciting meaning in what we are doing than we had even imagined to be possible. We came out of the experience absolutely exhausted, but convinced that this is the right thing for us to be doing right now. Even though we are filling next season to the brim with traditional concerts, the club tours will be a prominent feature of our schedule, and I hope we see you at one of them.

Truly, there's nothing like hearing a great performance of a string quartet in a great acoustic space, but as we're discovering there's also nothing quite like hearing a string quartet with your friends in a club over a beer!

Official release of New Voice Singles "Leyendas, an Andean Walkabout"

nospam@example.com (Greg Beaver) — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 07:50:46 -0700

Well, after an amazing week in New York in which we had the official release of our latest CD, I finally have a moment in which to let all of you faithful readers know about this exciting release. Leyendas, an Andean Walkabout is a string quartet by Gabriela Lena Frank that was commissioned by the Chiara Quartet in 2001 through generous help by the Musicorda Summer String Festival. It's an amazing, revolutionary work of art. Its conception was inspired by Gabriela's roots as a half-North American/half-Peruvian child (her father, a Brooklynite, met her mother in Peru while serving in the Peace Corps). She received a sizeable grant to travel to South America and used it to tour remote villages and cities in the Andes mountains of South America. With the help of a stealth recording device (microphones cleverly hidden in her eyeglasses) and the posthumous advice of Béla Bartók, who undertook the first such ethnomusicological journey in the early 20th century, she recorded hours of unique South American folk music, and used these recordings to influence the language of her own composition. Leyendas was one of the first works to be written in this new style.

We recorded the work in 2004 and as of January 11, have officially released the recording as the second in our ground-breaking Chiara New Voice Singles series of recordings of dynamic works commissioned and championed by the Chiara Quartet. For an unbiased appraisal of Leyendas and of our performance of the work, Alan Kozinn of the New York Times reviewed our "Mestizaje: Harmony of Differences" program at Merkin Concert Hall on January 11, in which we used Leyendas as a kind of musical tour guide through a landscape of composers whose music explores the happenings at the boundaries between two disparate cultures. In this review, he describes his reaction to the work and to the program overall (there's also a nice photo taken by the Times).

You can acquire our recording of Leyendas, an Andean Walkabout through CDBaby.com/chiarastring2 or amazon.com, or by attending one of our fine performances, where we sell the recording at a reduced price specially for those who come to hear us.

My favorite review ever - no, seriously

nospam@example.com (Greg Beaver) — Mon, 17 Jul 2006 16:30:34 -0700

This past Saturday, we performed on the final concert of the Meadowlark Music Festival in Lincoln, Nebraska. The concert featured pianist Arnaldo Cohen and we joined him on the second half for Brahms's great Piano Quintet in F Minor, Op. 34. The experience was of course a tremendously enjoyable experience. Cohen is not just a great pianist, he is able both to lead the sound with tremendous flexibility and clarity as well as follow. We were able to truly play as a quintet, with a balanced sound. In many cases, the meeting of a pianist and a quartet results in the complete obliteration of the strings inside an ocean of piano. When the right balance can be found between strings and piano, it is a magical experience. This certainly qualified in our book. Cohen was by no means quiet, you could hear him quite well all of the time, and in a few places where it is needed (like the end of the 1st movement), he very nearly covered our sound completely.

Even better, we received the most wonderfully innocent review afterwards. In most cases, reviewers tend to wax poetic on the elements of music that about 0.00001% of the population can understand. In some cases, great reviewers can find a way to educate as they critique a group while writing interesting prose as well.

The Lincoln Journal-Star chose to assign a novice reviewer to this concert, one who was unfamiliar with musical terminology such as "piece" versus "song" and the concept of a "movement." For those of you who are in the same boat, most classical music is called a "piece," reserving the word "song" for music that involves a singer. Most pieces are split up into separate sections that could work as separate "songs" called movements. It's a tradition that goes way back to the middle ages.

Anyways, there are two reasons why this is my favorite review ever. First, the review is written without much knowledge of classical tradition, and is a hilarious read for those "in the know" with quotes like:

The joint performance featured five Brahms pieces, all of which were mostly dominated by the strings.

The (1) piece we played was the 4-movement Brahms piano quintet. He thought it was 5 pieces because of the way it is listed in the program, which is to say it is something like:

Piano Quintet in F Minor, Op. 34 J. Brahms
Allegro non troppo
Andante, un poco adagio
Scherzo: Allegro
Finale: poco sostenuto - Allegro non troppo - Presto non troppo

and my favorite criticism ever: "too much strings, not enough piano fun!":

However, it would have been nice to hear a few pieces in which lead duties were more evenly split between the keys and the strings.

Nevertheless, the five performers received ample laudation from the audience and were called back onto stage twice before the crowd dispersed.

More importantly, it really highlights the strength of classical music in Lincoln, Nebraska. People who have clearly never been to a classical music concert are not only attending, they are reviewing concerts! This is fantastic news for those who are wondering about the state of classical music in the USA. It takes a lot to get a small newspaper to devote copy to a review, and the Lincoln Journal-Star did just that, and a fair amount as well. The reviewer is clearly writing with enthusiasm about an art form he has no regular contact with, and his closing paragraphs really capture the essence of his enjoyment:

And once again, the Meadowlark organizers found just the performers Lincoln’s classical music lovers were looking for — a healthy mix of new and familiar.

It was a concert of such a caliber that might not be seen again in Lincoln for a while — well, at least until next year’s Meadowlark season, that is.

Seriously - who could ask for anything more?

Finally - the truth about the strength of the classical music market!

nospam@example.com (Greg Beaver) — Mon, 29 May 2006 08:42:14 -0700

As Allan Kozinn of the New York Times reports, the classical music industry is doing just fine. In fact, it is a growth industry, and the numbers support this assertion, contrary to all the doomsday hemming and hawing. What is happening is what has always happened: a shift in what classical music means. Change is an essential part of vibrancy in culture, as the world refuses to stand still.

Go figure .

My favorite part of the article is where he quotes a 1967 NYTimes article claiming that classical music is dying with nice figures like "audiences are down 40%" and complaining about high ticket prices. Since then, the number of halls actively presenting classical music year-round in New York has doubled, and the same is true around the nation.

The full article is at: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/28/arts/music/28kozi.html

At last - the Mozart/Brahms recording is completed!

nospam@example.com (Greg Beaver) — Thu, 19 Jan 2006 21:59:14 -0700

This afternoon, we finished recording the last notes of Mozart's Clarinet Quintet with clarinetist H?kan Rosengren at Round Top's Festival Hill in Texas. We're very pleased with the sound quality, thanks to Sugar Hill recording studio's Andy Bradley and our producer, Katherine Powers. This completes an album of quintets we have recorded with H?kan. Last January, we recorded Brahms's clarinet quintet, also at Round Top. The record will be released initially on Round Top records some time this spring.

It has been a wonderful experience recording at Round Top. Not only does it demand that we be in top form, but the tremendous improvement in both our musical risk-taking and technical finish has been very gratifying. In addition, the concert hall at Festival Hill in Round Top has remarkable acoustics, eliminating the need for any post-production of the sound-tweaking variety. Even more importantly, we were able to take all the time we needed to make the recording, without having to cut corners in the quality of the final product. For this, we are eternally grateful to Round Top for hosting the recording and for hiring us to play a concert there, this being our third appearance during the winter concert season. We are particularly excited to hear this album, as it represents some of our best playing to date, and who wouldn't want to hear Brahms and Mozart's Clarinet Quintets

Well, perhaps those who have never heard the pieces before. If you are one of these poor souls, you can catch an excerpt of the Mozart from a live radio broadcast we played on Houston's KUHF radio station's "The Front Row" radio show this past Tuesday afternoon. An audio mp3 is available to hear the interview and performance at http://www.kuhf.org/programaudio/thefrontrow/2006/01/060117Chiara_96k.m3u. In the show, we performed the ebullient first movement and powerfully transcendent second movement of the quintet. One thing that continues to amaze me about Mozart as his 250th birthday approaches next week is how through tremendous simplicity he managed to find such profound meaning. What a guy!

We will be performing the Mozart Quintet along with two of his quartets at Round Top on Saturday, those of you who are in Houston or Austin, you can make reservations at http://festivalhill.org/cgi-bin/online/storepro.php.

Chiara Quartet competes in semi-finals of Bordeaux International Quartet Competition

nospam@example.com (Greg Beaver) — Mon, 27 Jun 2005 10:48:41 -0700

Bonjour mes amis!

Once again, the Chiara Quartet has been selected to compete in the semi-finals of a major international string quartet competition along with only 8 other quartets, this time in Bordeaux, France, just 1 week after competing in Italy (it's a rough life, I know). We will be performing in the Grand Theatre in Bordeaux tomorrow (Tuesday June 28) at 12:15 PM local time (GMT +01:00). Unfortunately, there is no webcast in this competition, so you have to show up in person to hear us. The finals are on the next day, should we be lucky enough to advance.

Chiara Quartet wins 3rd prize at Borciani Competition

nospam@example.com (Greg Beaver) — Sat, 18 Jun 2005 02:38:32 -0700

The results are in for the 7th Paolo Borciani International String Quartet Competition!

1st: Pavel Haas Quartet from the Czech Republic
2nd: Tankstream Quartet from Australia
3rd: Chiara Quartet from USA
4th: Biava Quartet from USA
Special prize for best performance of Peter Maxwell Davies piece: Haas Quartet

The judges deliberated for a record 4 1/2 hours, finally reaching a decision at 12:30 AM Italian time. Of the original 22 quartets, the highest number ever accepted into the first round, 14 advanced to the semi-finals, far more than usual, and 6 quartets were in the finals, also more than usual. The level this year is extraordinary, which bodes well for the careers of the winners as well as the other quartets, and for chamber music in general.

3rd prize includes a cash prize of 6,600 Euros and a performance on the winner's concert this Sunday.

Chiara Quartet advances to finals of Premio Paolo Borciani 2005

nospam@example.com (Greg Beaver) — Thu, 16 Jun 2005 13:06:23 -0700

Tomorrow, June 17 2005, at 12:10 PM (GMT +01:00, 6:10 AM EST), we will perform in the finals of the Premio Paolo Borciani International String Quartet Competition in Reggio Emilia, Italy. From the original and unusually large field of 22 quartets, the judges have winnowed down to 6 who will compete for the three prizes.

You can listen to us live at http://webradio.iteatri.re.it/

listen to the quartet live at 10 AM (GMT +1)

nospam@example.com (Greg Beaver) — Wed, 15 Jun 2005 09:43:01 -0700

Our performance in the semi-finals of Premio Paolo Borciani will be webcast live at http://webradio.iteatri.re.it from Reggio Emilia, Italy at 10 AM local time, which is 4 AM EST for those on the East Coast.