The Highest Craft: The Manhattan String Quartet at CGC|E – Reid Hall
Copyright © 2011 The Manhattan String Quartet. All rights reserved.
On January 20, the Grande Salle at Reid Hall resonated with the glorious music of Claude Debussy interpreted by one of the world’s premiere ensembles, the Manhattan String Quartet (MSQ). Their audience was comprised of amateur and semi-professional American and European string players who had come to Paris to study the same piece, the String quartet in G minor, Op. 10, with the members of the MSQ as their teachers. One hundred and fifty years after the birth of the composer, the participants of the MSQ’s Debussy in Paris conference were combining theoretical study, practical workshops, and life in Paris to fashion their personal art of playing Debussy.
The setup is straightforward: 14 amateur and semi-professional string quartets intensively study a chamber work in the composer’s city for two weeks with MSQ’s Curtis Macomber and Calvin Wiersma (violinists), John Dexter (violist), and Chris Finckel (cellist). This year, Prof. David Clampitt of The Ohio State University joined the group in Paris to conduct seminars on the theoretical and musicological aspects of the same work. The conference participants consulted manuscripts of Debussy’s score at the abbaye de Royaumont. But beyond these focused activities, daily life in Paris was also imbuing their music-making with ineffable qualities. Dexter reflects: “In Paris, the air is the same as it was in 1893…” Is he referring to the air that one breathes or the air of Parisian society or perhaps the melodic air embedded in Debussy’s score composed that year? Probably all of them. While living and breathing this “air,” this society, this music, the conference participants were developing a “global” style of music interpretation that was just as thrilling for their teachers as it was for them.
As Dexter observes, “an exchange of information” occurs between the participants and the four members of the MSQ for whom coaching is as much about learning as it is about teaching: “I’m listening to their interpretation and I get all this input.” The MSQ’s performance of the Debussy String Quartet at Reid Hall last month was the culmination of this exchange in Paris: the amateur musicians could hear their musica pratica, to use the expression coined by Roland Barthes, reflected and enhanced in their teachers’ performance.
The MSQ has conducted similar programs in European cities for the past several years with resounding success: Prague, Budapest, Vienna… This year’s performance at Columbia Global Center | Europe – Reid Hall has a special resonance. Both the MSQ and CGC|E aim to develop meaningful exchanges between students and teachers, to combine theoretical study, workshops, and practical experience in Paris to work on complex subjects, and in turn to use focused, intense projects as “filters” through which French society can be understood and experienced. A harmonious duo indeed.