A very warm welcome to this keynote note in the diversity and the British String Quartette Symposium.
My name is Venkatraman and I'm delighted to be chairing this very topic, a highly relevant session today.
The keynote will be delivered to us by Professor Laura Tonbridge. Professor is Nori's professor of music at Oxford University.
Her research has concentrated on German romanticism with a particular interest in reception through criticism, performance and composition.
She has thought and written extensively about musical genres, particularly those that try to straddle the lines between private and public and
between amateur and professional incarnations in their socio artistic contexts.
Since October 2019, Laura has been the recipient of a three major research fellowship from the Liverpool Trust for a new project,
a social and sonic history of the string quartette, and we're all looking forward to the outcome of that.
She will speak to us today on early string quartette residencies at academic institutions.
Nora will speak for about 45 minutes, after which we will take questions.
So please post your questions on the YouTube live chat.
Her talk to us today is entitled The String Quartette Takes Residence Class Community Curricula Open to Laura.
Thank you very much. I hope that you can see my screen and that I can get started.
And thanks to Victor for the very kind introduction and for hosting this session and also to my
colleague Joanna Bullivant and Samantha Dittman for inviting me to be part of this wonderful project.
There are two things I should warn you about before I start next Netflix style.
One is that there is one instance of strong language. And secondly, there's quite a lot of 70s fashion and the images you're about to see.
Anyway, I'll begin. A respectable university these days.
As a resident chamber ensemble or at least a working relationship with an outside string,
quartette declared The Guardian's music critic Gerald Lerner in November 1969.
And I should say we're going to hear a lot from Lahner this afternoon. He was the Guardian music critic from 1965.
Before that, he was a lecturer in German at the University of Manchester. A music critic for the North, I should say.
Some 45 years later,
composer Christopher Fox reflected that by the 1970s and his self respecting British University Music Department had a string quartette in residence.
There might be a subtle distinction to be made between a respectable university and a self respecting university,
but both phrases suggest that a resident string quartette signals something about an institution standing and aspiration.
But I'd like to do this afternoon is to consider what those qualities were,
as I think they might inflect our discussion of the question of the British string quartette today,
particularly in regard to how ensembles and universities tackle issues of diversity.
My focus will remain historical, selecting a couple of examples from the seeming heyday of Quartette residences in the late 1960s and 70s,
which happened to coincide with the so-called new universities. Allow me to ask alongside what a quarter some residents for what A is for?
I'd also like to raise the question of what constitutes diversity.
It will become clear, I think, that while education and access to culture are concerns shared across the decades,
whereas now attention might be paid primarily to gender, race and ableism.
In the 1970s, quartettes in residence, pretty much all white and male were concerned with class community engagement,
the north south divide and extending repertoire beyond the classical canon.
I'm not going to argue simply because I can't argue that those issues have since been resolved,
instead, I want to make sure that we keep them in the mix. The idea of a quartette in residence is often associated with American
universities and conservatives and with chamber music festivals such as Marlboro.
However, there had been quarters in a British music department since the 1920s under the aegis of the ever energetic musician and education,
is Sawford Davies, newly appointed as professor of music at University College Aberystwyth and as chairman of the National Council of Music for Wales.
Now these two images show both a portrait of British British music scene in 1988.
I've circled Davies and read his next Ebonie to sprout with the long beard.
You have the splendidly moustached Elgar, Stanford and so on.
And then you have Samuel Teleco on the back row and gazing off into the distance, Ethel Smyth,
who we heard about this morning, the other image you have of him and the signals that after having been Professor Davies,
they went and worked extensively for the BBC on their music appreciation programmes, in particular cigarette cars with his image.
I can't imagine having cigarette cards today, but also cigarettes with images of music professors on them.
The idea was soon picked up elsewhere by the late 1960s, Edinburgh and Cardiff had associations with professional quartettes,
which did some coaching and gave regular concert series,
while Birmingham had its own quartette made up of two university lecturers, one from the physics department and two professional musicians.
The renowned Amadeus Quartette began a residency at the University of York in 1967.
They were to spend three weeks there every time, giving two concerts at York and two elsewhere in the North for a generous annual
salary of six thousand pounds provided by a grant from Granada Television,
and the university paid their living expenses.
While it was acknowledged that this was a coup for the university and for concert goers in the region, the immediate benefits and felt not by Granada.
It was said and not by the university or the general public, but by the Amadeus Quartette,
so far as they were concerned, it was a chance for them to learn and rehearse repertoire.
Although they gave some individual lessons,
they were said to be sceptical that a string quartette good enough for them to coach could be found in a university music department.
Jared Loughner reported one senses a slight local resentment that they asked the students to pay for their tuition,
that they go home on the weekends to see the families naturally enough, and that their concerns have become not only so popular in the university,
but also so fashionable in the town that tickets have to be rationed and defended by an overwhelmed administrative staff.
One of the composers on staff, David Blake, was quoted as saying that while the residency was working well,
he was disappointed that their predominantly classical programmes, so little relation to what composing is about these days.
While the Omidyar's had some quartettes by Britain to pitch and Bartok and as we have a Florida shooting this morning,
also from the composer he was talking about in their repertoire, they were Siba sorry, they were wary of taking anything on the public.
Want to produce the Amadeus as a world class ensemble whose presence alone would be of benefit to York.
However, he concluded his article was something of a call to arms.
But another university praying for a similar fairy godmother act might consider whether a young chamber ensemble with its destiny not yet charted,
would suit its needs better. One that will coach will play through experimental student works and will involve itself
in amateur musical activities would not be as great as a quartette of the Amadeus.
But it could someday become one. A reply came from George Pratt, director of music at the University of CU,
you wrote to the editor explaining that they had just hired a young quartette who would be in residence from October.
The position was sponsored by nine thousand pound grant from the Liverpool Trust,
split over three years rather than six thousand pounds per annum enjoyed by the end of the year.
It would allow for young string players to study with Alexandrea.
Moskovsky had been second violin with a Hungarian string quartette and was now teaching at the Royal Manchester College of Music,
one of the forerunners at the RNC in. Explained.
There will be research students aiming to have acquired a high standard of play and a reputation sufficient
enough for them to be able to earn a living as a quartette when their three year term appeal is ended.
They're certainly not as great a quartette as the amateurs, though, were share, Mr. Lanas hopes that they could one day become one,
but there, as yet humble status makes it possible to ask that they should take an active part in a relatively amateur music making.
They will lead the string sections of the university orchestra,
take on a limited amount of individual teaching to an undergraduate string players and play chamber music to and with amateur instrumentalists.
Pratt hopes that the scheme may produce another Ramadans.
Meanwhile, we have a stimulus from your chamber music within the university and through the adult Education Department,
and later, I hope, three invitations to play outside the university.
This young quartette can gain both experience for themselves and also offer something to music in the Midlands.
This is quite a different approach to a quartette presidency, to previous schemes in Britain.
It was designed to create a new quartette from young musicians rather than to hire an existing ensemble.
In so doing, it recognised the need for a new quartette to have time to learn how to be a quartette,
which means not just learning repertoire, but how to play together and how to craft their own sound well.
The pedagogic element of the residency through coaching by Moskovsky outside of a conservatoire was more in line with continental,
European or Soviets mentoring models, groups in which tradition dominated international competitions and concert programmes.
Yet the scheme also hoped to embed the quartette in the university as performers and teachers and in the wider community.
As such, it reflected the set up of the university as a whole, which is worth a brief digression here.
After the Second World War, there was a recommendation that more provincial colleges,
which previously had been overseen by Oxford or Cambridge or the University of London, should be allowed to confer their own degrees.
While industrial cities such as Manchester and Birmingham had founded universities in the 19th century, the so-called red bricks,
the potteries had lacked the financial muscle and political influence to do so until the foundation of the University of North Staffordshire in 1949.
Its first principle was Lord Lindsay, a philosopher who'd been master of Balliol College and vice chancellor of Oxford University.
Jill was deeply committed to education for the working classes and as you put it
in a lecture to North Staffordshire Workers Educational Association in 1925,
advocated for, quote, a people's university. When an opportunity came to buy a hole from the Sneyd family, the Reverend Thomas Harwood,
vicar of Australia and leader of the Labour Group on Stoke City Council,
encouraged them to bid for it, which allow them to build a university campus in a green site away from the city.
University of Kiel was granted a full charter in 1960 to.
Lord Lindsay believes that, quote at the end of education is a better understanding of the society in which we live.
He argued that specialist, an expert knowledge, needs to be balanced with a wide outlook,
and general understanding is that if we are going to try and keep a democratic country and maintain understanding of one another,
we have to send out people from our universities who can do the technical stuff and who at the same
time have an understanding of political and social problems and the values that lie behind them.
Nancy died a decade before the university opened,
but his ideas formed the basis for its curriculum and this was shaped differently to those of Oxbridge or the red bricks.
Instead of concentrating on one subject or two closely related ones, all students took a foundation year that incorporated arts,
sciences and social sciences before deciding to concentrate on two subjects and some subsidiary ones.
Music was introduced subsidiary subject on the undergraduate curriculum in nineteen sixty five.
There have been a music director at the university, you already mentioned George Pratt overseeing musical activities on campus since 1958.
He might not have had the modern brutalist architecture of other universities built in the 1960s,
the plate glass universities of Sussex as East Anglia, Warwick Kent and Lancaster,
but they shared Linzess generalist principles and the notion that by all being together on
a residential campus outside of an attractive regional town rather than the large city,
they might foster close pedagogical and social context as well as better pastoral care.
These issues were coming to the fore as the nature of university provision was changing across the country.
Student numbers were rapidly increasing, along with a number of universities at the start of the Second World War.
Only two percent of the British population went to university in 1939.
There were 50000 students in 21 universities. By 1961, numbers more than doubled to one hundred thirteen thousand.
Students are more willing to travel to universities rather than to stay local, which is one reason why Campus University succeeded.
What they studied was also changing. In the 1930s, half the undergraduate student population took up subjects.
The post-war expansion of the universities and the degree subjects they offered shifted that to science and technology law.
Is this an accountancy? To the extent that in 2009 only 11 percent of students were taking degrees in the humanities?
Stefan Collini and what are the universities for?
Observes that the 1960s and 70s are exceptional in the history of undergraduate provision in the United Kingdom.
They were the first and last decade in which Britain tried to sustain a substantial,
still rigorously selective, wholly state funded system of high quality, undergraduate centred universities.
There remained a strongly paternalistic side of the universities, if they were beacons of culture,
as Kathleen said, they shone light on a very particular aspect of its.
A report on the foundation year Akeel published in 1968 acknowledged that lindsy deliberately
limited the scope to Western culture by adopting the phrase the heritage of European civilisation.
It is thus no criticism of the cause that emissions can be detected with ease.
But if there is any intention to include in the course of discussion of contemporary problems,
it's hard to see how to justify the neglect of the political and economic roles of the USA and the USSR.
The influence on 20th century thought of Marx and Freud and a psychological basis of nationalism and racial prejudice.
Where does the string quartette fit in here? How does that address contemporary problems?
The appointment of a group of young musicians would learn to work together and share the growing
expertise of students would seem in line with the community ethos and civilising process.
There's little doubt the majority of a string quartette repertoire typically represents the rich European heritage more
than anything is tempting to see the appointment of the quartette in residence as representing the taste of luxury.
That editor of the Times educational supplement Walta James,
thought every university should be able to offer in an article supporting the use of private funds to raise funds for higher education institutions,
where he mentioned a city based on sponsorship of the Amadeus residency at York.
The Bernstine connexion also points to something beyond the elite university.
As founder of Granada Television, Bernstine had made a case for the cultural strength and coherence of the north of England.
And James acknowledged that some areas, for example, York had a strong tradition of local benefaction.
If a quartette were to enhance music in the Midlands, it needs to tap into civic pride that those areas had access to artists of the highest quality.
You could compete with those performing in London, which had access to so many international musicians that residencies were not as vital.
The difficulty of finding adequate candidates meant that Appetiser posted
quartette quotation residence for two years before finding suitable musicians.
Eventually,
he appointed four students in the Royal Academy of Music who were already playing together as a quartette and have been coached by Sidney Griller.
His own quartette had been in residence at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1949 1961.
Greene, the King. They change their name in homage to the founder of the new university home, calling themselves the Lindsy Quartette.
Jared Loughner, he had hoped some university would take up the gauntlet of taking a young quartette
on Gedeh Review to the inaugural concert by the Lindsey Quartette in November 1968.
They played high school, setting seventy seven No. One but second quarter.
And Beethoven's Opus 59. Number three, it was Falana, an encouraging event.
While nerves seemed to affect the first half, Billings's grew showed in the second.
When they have the technical security to take risks, they could become an exciting string quartette, he said.
You can explain the arrangement with the university.
Each player was employed as a research fellow with an annual salary of around a thousand pounds, which is about thirteen thousand today.
It's worth noting that they had to be called research fellows to fit in the university system,
and I assume for the funding and early manifestation of the practise as research agenda.
In this context, it meant that the quarter had been rehearsing and having tuition for Moskovsky for over a year before they made their debut.
Pratt was quoted as saying that there was an altruistic aspect to the set up,
which is that we can enable a young quartette to stay together without having to work on the back desks of some orchestra as well.
The scheme bore fruit.
The Lindsays, going to third place of the International String Quartette competition in Vienna, Belgium, in 1969, with Lonn explaining, quote,
It was the youngest quartette in the competition and its success against state sponsored competition
from elsewhere was largely the result of enlightened arrangement of the Enlightenment arrangement.
To kill the reference to state sponsored competition presumably refers to the Soviet Union.
And as I'll come to you later, there was some intriguing quartette, diplomacy taking place during these years.
But perhaps most striking Islamised description of the arrangement,
Acuil as enlightened a term that again positions the presence and nurturing of a quartette
within a university environment as being indicative of a deliberate educational strategy.
Proj was concerned that after the leadership fellowships had ended, the Lindsays will be set adrift,
condemned to endlessly playing the music club circuit to make ends meet at the university Senate.
Vote to the presidency should be extended for a further two years.
The first London concerts in 1970 were welcomed by the critics, with Edward Greenfield conveying their rough edges with most wit.
If Ken, motorists sometimes describe a car as hairy energy and responsiveness,
the quality is rather the smooth efficiency, then the lenses make an attractive Harry quartette.
As you'll see from this next slide, reminiscences from students, Aqeel, while volunteers were in residents,
range from the deeply appreciative through to acknowledgements that they realised what an opportunity their presence was only after they graduated.
So we go from remembering the boxes they used to soundproof the hole they rehearsed in.
And Peter Cropper being a resident tutor. Through to feeling privileged to have witnessed them at the start of a great career,
then to someone who was completely unaware of them because at the time she preferred the Grateful Dead and then came
to them later and saw themselves as being fortunate to have gotten what they were wearing on the farewell tour.
And then finally, sadly, I didn't appreciate the Lenzi quartette much during my time,
Akeel, but has learnt through their daughter to appreciate the music.
It was soon recognised that Lindsay's vision of a civilised community of 800 students at CU was being eroded, a student numbers increased.
By 1972, there were two thousand two hundred students enrolled and no plans to expand to 3000.
Some chose or had to live off campus or forsook the student union in favour of staying in their residential halls.
Hopes for engagement with local communities was also harder to achieve than originally envisioned.
The Times reported that the geographical isolation of CU is a cause of prejudices both within and outside the university.
If you ask someone in the potteries just three miles away about kill,
a likely answer would be they live in that country house on the hill, surrounded by a high wall.
I don't know what they do all day. We only see them once a year when they come into Stoke-On-Trent on floats, waving flags.
Yeah, during the time Akeel, the lenses encountered another local institution news director would transform their attitude to community engagement,
cellist Bernard Greg Smith and his recently published memoirs recalled a rehearsal for a concert at the
old Victoria Theatre in Stoke-On-Trent in 1969 and 1970 when they met Peter Cheesman for the first time.
We arrived at the theatre, complete with our usual trappings of suits, white shirts, shiny shoes, and began to rehearse and try out the space.
This was tricky, it being a veteran around a Shakespearean theatre when no one in the audience was very far away,
something quite new to us and rather intimidating. We didn't see how it could work.
The idea of playing to the audience behind you is very peculiar. An actor is much more mobile and can swivel to confront the audience behind.
We learnt from Peter Cheesman that we should relax and forget that worry.
The intimacy provided from being closely surrounded outweighed that small problem.
But when Cheeseman's are intended to for the forthcoming concert, you roared with laughter.
You shout it from the back, you can't wear those penguin outfits.
This is an evening of music and we allow these people who are coming up, potters, miners, the shopkeepers, they want to be happy.
You've got to appear natural, normal and communicative, not dressed like unapproachable nuns.
One of us said, but we're here to play. I asked, what are you going to say?
He said, scrutinising this as we came where players outtalking tokers, you can't just play.
You've got to open your bloody mouth. This isn't the thing with Moho.
Peter, Croppa, the most vociferous amongst us, picked up the gauntlet, according to Greg Smith,
abandon the tail jackets and bow ties and Croppa became adept at introducing the pieces they were going to play.
Now, if I can, I'd like to show a clip from 1977, which shows the lindsy quartettes in action at the Old Vic,
and I think this involves me stopping sharing my screen and hopefully we'll be able to access this video.
Online. It lasts about five minutes, but I think it is worth watching, I'm nervous.
This week begins a concert in Stoke that features the fallen musicians who make up the Linzey string quartette.
They're a very remarkable group of players. This quartette not only for their musical ability,
but also because one of their aims is to break down the mystique which still surrounds chamber music,
even to some people who seem to enjoy opera or romantic symphonies.
Peter Cheeseman's Victoria Theatre in Stoke the Lind's, has been doing an entire Beethoven cycle this season in a specially informal atmosphere.
The Omnibus Film Unit spent some time with them last January to prepare this portrait of the lindsy quartette at work.
We found that really a university was a marvellous basis on which to build a quartette.
It gives you a chance to not consciously mould yourselves,
but just purely by being together for the number of hours that a university position will allow you to do,
because you definitely need time to mould for people's way of thinking and way of playing.
Beethoven was commissioned by Congress, mostly like three quartettes.
Fifty nine, I think the slight movement of 59 one is just out of this world, just fantastic.
That's the great thing about it.
I mean, you imagine most people doing the same thing for 20, 30, 40 years, playing the same music time and time again.
But we've only done it for nine years now. I still every time I and I still find something new every time.
This. Mean.
I'm not saying that this is the only time it should be, I think they should be every possibility.
I mean, I like dressing up for certain occasions, but when you see people in tails on a platform, say,
50 yards away from you, you tend to think of them as purely machines that are producing a sound that you want to hear.
We're trying to break that down with these particular countries, provide people with something to drink and try and show them that we are,
in fact, human beings with the same sort of feelings that they have. And I think this doesn't often come across.
And. And.
Thank you.
The vic was one of several theatres in the round, established in the 1960s and 70s, picking up on Steven Joseph's work as Scarboro in the mid 50s.
Indeed, Joseph worked with Cheesman in Stoke. Others include the Everyman in Liverpool, the Octagon in Bolton Kopit Theatre in London, the first,
which apparently was association round since in London since the Great Fire, the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond.
Amongst his royal exchange. It was a political aspect in allowing audiences to engage with actors more dynamically, literally from every angle.
It was matched in Cheeseman's case to a commitment to putting on plays about local subjects and engaging with the surrounding community.
The way the Lindsays talk about their performances in the clip suggests a similar impulse to break down the mystique,
which still surrounds chamber music through showing that rather than being killing machines, we are, in fact, human beings.
The court has extended the practise of playing in the round of other venues,
one contributor to the Cheal oral history project recalls them rearranging the assembly room of the prestigious benzyl festival.
Subsequent association was shuffled through the residents of the university in the mid 70s and the long
running annual festival in the student theatre of Sheffield's Crucible had been playing around as well.
I continue to visit Stoke after affiliation with Chelate ended and as I had in Sheffield and later Manchester, I built up a long following.
Guardians on this show, the chickens are called. It wasn't exactly an avalanche of classical concerts in Middle Staffordshire in the 1980s.
This was the only music that I got to hear performed locally. I was so lucky through the lenses.
I first had the beacons of the canon. Again, that word beacon is coming up again.
Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, Beethoven and Shostakovich and Croppa hosted workshops and gave talks before it was standard.
There was nothing distant or Olympian about the way the quartette played or indeed dressed proper,
was incapable of formality and will open Tosha sandals with socks and crumpled shirts.
The plane was earthy, passionate at times lacking a cool perfection, but always utterly exhilarating cropper.
And the lenses were hugely important internationally, but especially precious to us living in the Midlands and the north of England.
I can corroborate Higgens account from my own experience of going to concerts by the Lindsays while I was growing up in Manchester,
though that city generally had more going on musically.
The concerts in the music department than housed in an old cinema on the road held a special place in the calendar and tickets were coveted.
The audience is a concert series by the Lindsays were probably made up mostly by middle class residents of Stoke Sheffield in Manchester.
Doctors, teachers and university lecturers. But they could indeed introduce not only students,
but also local young people to the classics and their more informal dress and spoken introductions
as well as they're playing some venues made their concerts somewhat less foreboding than the whole.
I'm intrigued, though, by Higgins inclusion in her canon alongside Haydn, Mozart, Schubert and Beethoven, Shostakovich,
that indicates a shift in reception that had a lot to do with my next example of a string quartette in residence, the Fitzwilliam.
The Fitzwilliam quartette took their name from the Cambridge College, where they met in 1968 after graduation in 1971,
they joined the University of York as quartette in residence while studying with Sidney Griller at the Royal Academy of Music.
They were learning on the job, so to speak, even more so than the Lindsays,
who graduated from the studying with Greller at the academy when they arrived to kill.
Relative use of these quartettes in terms of the players themselves and how recently the group had formed was acknowledged by critics,
in some ways this enhanced their suitability for a position within a university as perhaps of the scheme.
They could ask them to do more on campus than an established touring group.
Moreover, a quartet's usefulness could impact the kind of repertoire they played and perhaps also what and how they were expected to play.
And generally, 1972, Brian Newbold reported the. York is the latest university to have acquired a resident string quartette,
not an established group with a ready made reputation, but a young team just finding its feet as an ensemble.
The Fitzwilliam Quartette is already being bold in its choice of programmes during its first academic session.
Last night's concert to the Lyons Concert Hall did not look tame on paper.
Inevitably, they were failures in its execution. But it was not a major hurdle that brought these aspirants down.
One of the shadows in the brooding quartette points out in his memoirs that British critics always have.
But in their reviews, they never outright in their praise.
Newbold went on to list the shortcomings of the renditions of Beethoven's Third Rasmusson quartette and the Mendelssohn F minor quartette Opus 80,
while conceding that the Mendelssohn was an enjoyable revival of an underplayed work
and that the performance of Shostakovich six quartette was careful and pleasing,
it concluded for the time being, there is any way more pleasure to be had from half formed interpretations by a
youthful quartette than from wrong-headed or tired ones by an overworked star group.
You might have been alluding here to the famous long established Amadeus Quartette
who was mentioned have been the previous quartette and residents of New York.
If it's William's willingness to include some underplayed Mendleson might have been part of the bold programming to which Newbold referred,
so too might have been the Shostakovich is quartettes,
another Guardian reviewer noted trouble that less than half the speed is less than half the reality of his symphonies.
In fact, love has traced the shifting reception of Shostakovich symphonies in Britain and notes of
the performance of the first quartette at the Edinburgh Festival in 1962 by the Burdine,
Allegri and English quartette with a turning point. But it still took some time for them to feature regularly.
The ambitious repertoire of the Fitzwilliam quartette was recognised repeatedly in early
reviews Jared Loughner observed at a concert given during Yorke's new Music Week in July 1973.
It was a difficult programme for young quartette to undertake, not that an older one would have approached it.
It began with David Blake's second quartette and ended with Sebastian Vulpes.
Second quarter quartette in between.
Came Shostakovich's 13th quarter, which Lerner acknowledged that Williams had memorably introduced to this country a few months previously,
David Blake was the best enforcer, both composers, both, in fact, Cambridge graduates working in academia.
Blake, who I mentioned earlier, commented about the Omidyar's quartette that it was a shame they wouldn't play
new works was a founder member of the University of York's Department of Music,
and Forbes had just joined the University of Surrey. In other words, they represented the new universities.
Composers constituted the whole music faculty at York Market at amongst British University departments
Will Robin has written about how the role of new music ensembles within American universities,
enabling staff and student composers to have their pieces workshopped and perform within an academic environment.
quartettes might not be music specialists, but they could be chorales to play some within a university setting,
which reveals something about the perception both the string quartette repertoire and what
the function of the quartette as a genre and as an ensemble is within the institution.
Diversity can reside in the repertoire that's played as is evident in the concert programmes and roundtables at the symposium.
In comparison to Blake and Forbes, Shostakovich might seem mainstream, however, as mentioned in the early 1970s,
his quartettes were not that well known in Britain, and the composer still needs to find advocates to give premiers outside of what was then the USSR.
Shostakovich was in London in November 1972 for a festival of Russian and
Soviet music and agreed to visit New York as biographer Laurel Faithful said,
to help the young members of the Fitzwilliam quartette refine their interpretation of its 13th quartette.
Violist Alan George recalls that they were on a crusade to perform Shostakovich's music,
having realised that the 13th quarter had yet to be performed in Britain and that they were surprised that the composer should have taken
such interest in a relatively inexperienced group until they realised that distressingly conscious of his age and his precarious health,
you must have felt reassured to know that this old man's music could live and thrive in young hands.
The relationship the musicians forged meant the Shostakovich sent them his next to his last quartettes when the barraging quartette
were prevented from by illness from giving the British premiere of Shostakovich's 14th quartette at the opera festival the first.
Williams performed it at the Haraga Festival. Instead.
They received an invitation to visit Shostakovich in his dacha to work together on half a dozen of his quartettes.
But the composer died before they could do so. This Williams went on to become authoritative interpreter and Shostakovich.
They made the first complete recording of the quartettes and recently rerecorded them.
That's an interesting question here about the Cold War reception of Shostakovich and about the musical
relationships between Soviet musicians who promoted his music and the British groups who also played it.
That I can't really go into here, though I will flag cellist of the borrowing quartette Buntine.
Berlinski, whose comment was Shostakovich's and other Russian quartettes are particularly difficult for non Russian players to interpret.
The British presence in Britain as performers and coaches was key to a performance practise for this repertoire being developed.
On another practical level, the inability of Soviet string quartettes to fulfil their engagements in Britain,
whether because of illness or because of the fear they would defect to the West,
gave British court has the premiere as a son works, as we've seen with the civilians, and thereby encourage them to be performed.
Incidentally, a quartette being unable to leave the Soviet Union was said by Bernard Smith
to be the reason that the LINDSY quartette were first summoned to Sheffield.
They stood in for a concert at the last minute and struck up a relationship with Professor Basil Main,
who appointed them as quartette in residence there and took them with him to Manchester.
There's also a sense in which young cadets based in residence at the university, supported by the institution and a salary,
were willing to take a risk on unchallenging repertoire or at least repertoire that an audience might not like.
The Fitzwilliam Court moved on to a residence at the University of Warwick and have more recently returned to their alma mater,
taking up residence in Cambridge. As I mentioned, the Lindsays moved from Kiel to Sheffield and then to Manchester before retiring in 2005.
Both court has built up a loyal following amongst local audiences,
and there is a great deal of community building that can be achieved through such long term relationships.
There is a tension here between the initial aims of the residences and what came to pass,
the Lindsays, as discussed, were appointed Acuil as research fellows. In essence, they were students learning the trade as performers and teachers.
Well, the University of Khiel had a relatively small student body. A quartette might not seem out of reach of anyone on campus.
A student numbers increased, however, for people playing classical music in a hall that could accommodate an ever
diminishing proportion of the university population seemed less accessible,
especially as the quartette built up a loyal following. The community that's so important to chamber music is, by nature, exclusive.
The longevity of the 10 years of such quartette residencies was part of their strength.
Yet as they stayed in post, they became a silver haired as the season ticket holders.
A crucial element of Gerald Llanos call to arms for a young chamber ensemble with its destiny not yet charted, has forgotten.
The Lindsays may not have been exactly the same as the Amadeus Quartette in residence, but in some respects they did become like them.
Sarah Ahmed, in the conclusion to being included, racism and diversity and institutional life,
observes that we realise much about institutional life through what she calls failures of residents.
Are the correct categories in which we are immersed in styles of life become explicit when you do not quite inhabit them,
as we consider the role of Quartet's speaking from within inhabiting a university system.
It's vital that we keep caution in mind. Thanks very much.
Thank you very much, Laura, for this hugely rich and very stimulating paper,
I will give a quick response that will hopefully lead us into the questions.
And I'm sure there are many questions on the chat function already.
And you are in wonderfully introduced many of many of the critical discussions of this symposium.
I think and I would like to start with Sarum, its words that you gave to us,
that at the very end, particularly this idea that you do not quite inhabit something.
Right, because that particular phrase and what she's talking about that points the
finger at our consistent failure to address diversity because we perpetuate the,
as she calls it, categories in which we are immersed in styles of life by persistently trying to inhabit them,
trying to make sense of them, trying to make them our own.
So your investigation of the string quartette residences at the British universities between the
60s and throws into relief the sort of sharp irony of what they are actually trying to achieve.
And I really enjoyed the sort of tension that comes through on so many levels that if we just sort of put bullet points to them,
they they wanted to achieve a community engagement through art or an artistic practise.
Amateur music making and engagement through that amateur music making, tapping into civic pride was part of civic pride, was part of that.
But then they also wanted to live a culture and civilisation. And that sort of word keeps coming through that as a sort of red line.
And obviously it's criticised as well, but it's very much part of the narrative.
So the obvious question becomes why have a string quartette in residence?
Isn't that what is sort of establishing many of these tensions? The string quartette itself is is a very expensive medium.
To train each person individually has spent a lot of money training before they get to the point of being a string quartette.
The string quartette as a genre has a sort of self professed ideology of being music for connoisseurs.
Going back to the late 18th, early 19th century, the string quartette, certainly by the 60s and 70s,
has got these cultural association with, you know, what he wonderfully called the effing Wigmore Hall.
So why have a residency of a string quartette? Why not choose to have the residency of a brass quartette,
get composers to compose contemporary music for them and sort of weave the community engagement and an introduction of a particular
kind of culture that they obviously want to introduce around a medium that may be much more familiar to the local audiences.
So that's sort of the tension that really sits in here. And I would claim that the civilising project itself undermines that.
That is inherent in the string quartette and in the choice of the string quartette undermines
the very idea of diversity as it establishes automatically a hierarchy of cultures,
of lifestyles and of people. And that, of course, has a long heritage, as we all know.
But in music, it was particularly modelled in the mid to late 19th century.
We only need to think of L.A. schools that you take along to the recital so
that you truly understand and you could truly learn what this child is about.
Rove's entire project programme notes.
And then then the dictionary has nothing else in mind, really, but that civilising into an understanding of something higher than where you came from.
And what your paper has highlighted for me is the sort of fascinating reluctance to let go of some of that,
even even at the point in the 60s to 80s, when society has been through a lot of upheaval.
That's something that's being held onto.
There's a fascinating reluctance to let go of boundaries around art, around education, and with that around genres,
there's a reluctance to let go of certain cultural values and of particular ideologies that are deeply steeped in hierarchies.
That is, of course, a question of the particular historical point,
as well as the sort of looking back to to the scholars that are still relatively
fresh and the desire to establish a culture of authority and let's face it,
to prove to oneself that one is really a civilised nation, despite everything that has gone before.
Which makes it interesting that the string quartette has a strong Germanic heritage as well, of course.
And we have to take into account when we are now thinking about this from our.
Point of view that we haven't had any waves of feminism, let alone any particular race theory at that point.
So the battle is not we are fighting today are obviously quite different, whereas the battles they fought were largely Eurocentric.
And we can see the sort of critique of the Eurocentrism just about creeping in there by suggesting that we need to expand to the US and the USSR.
And it's very class centric or middle class centric education and middle class centric.
So our battles today are different ones, and the question this raises very aptly, I think for the for the symposium and the many sessions to come,
is are to really is thinking about the string cost that still useful and relevant today?
How do we deal with a string quartette and heritage? And B is thinking about the idea of residences, residences, useful,
and the residences perhaps offer up a sort of much more immediate solution in that they relate very neatly to
the practise based research that is on a on a strong trajectory at the moment and that can have new currency.
And it was interesting that they were actually the Lindsays were enrolled as a research fellows.
And that's something that I would love to hear more details about how exactly that was defined.
But so if we take that forward, there's lots of large potential for projects that can start with with composition,
as David Blaggard suggested in the 1960s, of playing within the round of sort of breaking particular traditions and models.
Now, what about the string quartette? The string quartette, of course, has got the tension implicit in itself that that from its inception,
it was it came with the rhetoric of being for connoisseurs and early rhetoric that was nevertheless imposed by
critics and then adopted by composers and performers as a way of establishing themselves within a new market system,
as sort of a new intellectual, refined virtuosity on the concert platform that formed a counterpart to a different kind of virtuosity.
But I think what's perhaps more interesting is if we think about its other history, its social history,
the social history where it was made by players to be played for players and for the strong idea of
having social interaction and social engagement with each other rather than witnessing it second hand.
So that interaction is part of its social social history. It has its exclusive elements to it, of course, as well.
But maybe that's a sort of key to helping us today.
Think, think, think, think about how we can remodel this genre in this particular type of music making.
Again, it's the idea of in the round that is the first step of breaking down some of those boundaries.
But I would claim that this needs to extend to a much more narrow question of genre definitions,
genre boundaries and the concomitant modes of its performance.
One example that I like in that context is of fifth string quartette, the Rosa Parks quartette,
where he does actually get an even bigger audience involved by asking them to clap.
So in the round is properly expanded. It's properly extended out in that everyone who is sitting in the round or standing
in the round does start to actively participate rather than witnessing it.
But the Christian political question becomes, how do we shed our habit of just wanting to fight,
wanting to belong, and how do we instead gain enough of a critical distance?
And with that, of course, comes the question, how do we do this in particular within academia, within an institution,
within institutions that are founded on the civilising project that have that civilising project written into them.
So in that sense, I think your paper has opened up an array of wonderful political considerations that I hope will
be taken up over the next couple of days about the interactions of genre and its associations,
institution and education, audiences and diversity or critical considerations that I believe will be really explored, particularly tonight.
I'm looking forward to the session of String quartettes written by younger people in the
community and also by the debate about writing the challenges of writing for string quartette.
And today that that composers face. So I want to wrap up, though,
by coming back briefly to the wonderful Granada television clip of the Lindsays and ask you whether you can elaborate a little bit more
on this question of modes of engagement and stepping into a diversity realm beyond repertoire and through that most of engagement.
And what struck me as particularly interesting watching that clip was that while the television station in itself heralds a sort of era of diversity,
of branching out, having a television station for the north, the television itself, of course,
making the concert much more visible and making the working process that they are documenting in this particular clip much more visible to a much,
much wider audience. At the same time, the filming techniques that they use, in my opinion, were incredibly demarcating.
Whenever we had the musicians, we had the instruments. We didn't actually have people interacting with each other.
The people's interaction was replaced by the mystique of the sound that interacts with each other.
And often we saw just their hands on the instrument rather than them looking at each other and and,
you know, having some kind of enjoyable social experience. And then we are cutting to the bar where people are mixing and mingling and drinking.
But that's a different set. So it was interesting to me to see that Granada seems to have not thought this
through to its logical conclusion and all the boundaries are actually upheld.
And what it amounts to in the end is we are introducing you to this mystique.
We are elevating you were civilising you by giving you an insight into this whole mystique so that
I would I would love to sort of pass over back to you with that wonderful television clip in mind.
Thank you very much. And thanks for all the points you've raised, because it's so much to try and deal with here.
And I'm not going to reach any kind of great conclusion.
But actually, that whole thing of actually what the quartette means, how we can use it within this setting, I think is really fascinating.
The clip, you're right, it does still privilege the musical experience as being a very special thing and trying to convey that.
It does remind me of when you see plays, films of the 1970s and the sort of interesting camerawork.
And I was trying to imagine.
So they had footage of the audience, but then they must have done separate sessions, I guess, so they could do the close ups,
which actually, having looked at a fair amount of string quartette, footage now is relatively rare to get those kind of close ups.
And there is I think it's BBC rather than Granada. This particular clip. But some of we are bringing culture to an unusual environment.
I'm going to show that these are relatively young men going off in the car of snakes
past and that there is a kind of youthful enterprise to this that is attractive.
How do you talk to the man in the street as the BBC was famously struggled to work with?
Then actually, we are now going to take this into your home, through the medium, the television,
and suggest to you that you two could go and it will be OK because you can get your point at the end of your orangeade.
So it's doing a lot of work work within a very small section. But what's interesting is the amount of space it gives to the music and the
fact that it's Beethoven and that it actually has a sense of giving the whole.
And as the movement, the citizens of performance there and the special qualities of performance,
so it's doing the same kind of institutional work that I think a lot of these residences are also doing, which is both.
We want to educate you. We want to allow you to appreciate this music.
But we're also going to prove to you that it is still very hierarchical and these musicians are special people.
It's interesting, they don't show the quartette talking to the audience, which they do regularly, but it is all just about the performance on stage.
Yeah, it's almost like it wants to hold on to this mystique, right,
this Nereus artist who is in that space and and takes on a sort of a superior role or
a different way of communicating something very universal and and and value of it.
Right. Yeah. And those problems still linger with any project that tries to go and take classical music out into alternative venues.
This is not so much that people don't like going to those venues.
Everyone still behaves as if they're in a concert hall and they silent and don't want to click the glasses or anything else.
And so there still is tension is happening. And how much information did you find on how the modes of engagement worked within the residency?
So how much community work did the string quartettes do and when they were working with the students and what type of work that they do with them?
I haven't found out enough about that yet. It's one of the limitations of Pandemic's that I have been able to get into the archives.
Either of the leaders seem to know more about the kind of the criteria for the fellowships,
but also actually details of whatever details remain of programmes and activities.
So I have kind of Second-Hand reports, but nothing systematic here.
Hopefully I'll get a chance to do that. So fingers crossed that this would happen because that would be fascinating to see
how the amateur engagement or the community engagement in particular actually works.
You know, what are they taking out? And and is the boundaries around that civilising process broken in any way in those processes?
And we have got some questions coming in. And the first question you have is from Joanna.
I read it out to you. My father in law was raised in a working class Nottingham household and later got a degree and
doctorate in adult hood and worked in Cumbria in the 80s concerts for a tiny Cumbrian music society.
I wondered if you think the string quartette is important not just for university students at 18, but for adult or to didacticism?
Great question that. Yes, a great question. Yes.
I mean, there's a whole culture of the music societies and quartettes going out to in some ways you think,
well, how nested why is that on the concert circuit?
But actually it's a really important part, both of music appreciation, didacticism and community building.
And the idea of having an event within a village hall or whatever it is,
is something that still exists not quite as vividly, but I think is still present.
Certainly talking to quartettes, the idea that you still end up going to some quite minor venues,
you would think from a sort of academic musicological perspective,
but actually have very important both for the quartettes getting experience, but also for people to have the opportunity to hear live concerts.
I mean, quartettes are expensive to train, but they're not as expensive as having a symphony orchestra or a larger ensemble.
So it's not not the cheapest way of getting music. But actually they they don't get terribly well paid.
And it is a relatively economical getting hold of like musicians. And thank you.
Florian cheating has also he I think he's picking up on similar points to what I raised,
I was struck, he says that the Lindsays turned their backs on the audience in the clip.
In so doing, they seem to socially produce a space thick with hierarchies and hierarchies.
Yeah, this is a relaxed, inclusive atmosphere. On the other, it's exclusive.
They are turned towards an imaginary centre of culture. Those further away are less involved in the social production of space,
given the Februaries largely contemporaneous with the time period you're looking into.
You go along with such a Marxist analysis and for how useful do you think it might be?
Oh yeah, why not? But actually,
there's an interesting culture of what's grown up around the Chinese and it comes out in the in the discussion with the quartette with us.
I mean, we don't want to play because we have our backs to the audience. And it's interesting that they haven't found.
A way to show that differently in the way that it's filmed, but also talking to regulars, to court concerts, that sense of overhearing,
of being a part of the process of the interiority of the musical experience is a lot of what people are attracted to.
So, yes, it is deeply hierarchal and you can read it in that sense in terms of space and different layers within it.
And it is complicated. I need to do more to work out exactly what's going on in the in the ground, because in some ways,
if you go to somewhere like the Crucible, you can sort of see in much more.
It doesn't feel so much as if people look at the facts to you.
But obviously it can also mean that they can't move, as they say, like actors can't get out of the way.
And it's an interesting question that, isn't it?
Because, of course, that's sort of started to happen in symphonic halls as well.
I mean, the one in Cologne, as for many decades now, has that in the round set up.
The family in Hamburg has that set up.
So and other large ensembles are sort of using that idea of looking in and off of a type of voyeurism that comes with it.
And but I do wonder where the ideology comes from and whether if you take the
string quartette to people who have never witnessed the string quartette,
not read about it and not listen to recordings of it and come with fewer preconceptions,
whether that would be the mystique that they want and the comparison with, you know,
with jazz performance is always a little sad, but is nonetheless quite a useful one to visualise it.
Right. Because are we expecting the same kind of voyeurism where we aren't really infiltrating it there?
Why are we finding it in the string quartette? Where does that come from? Yeah,
but there's also that it goes back again to the idea that people can also be practitioners of German music as amateurs and so go to see professionals.
And then actually in a sense of going and looking in,
that's not so dissimilar from if you go to somebody's home and are sitting on the sofa or somebody else playing string quartettes peculiar situation.
But I mean, it's something that is part of that culture of music making.
And so that's sort of I wonder I'm not sure I'm convinced by this,
but whether that is a sort of a the way the amateur musicians can sort of interact and in some ways be on the same page,
overlook the same page as the professionals in the centre. I'm not sure.
Mhm.
Yeah, so the the interaction becomes a sort of more metaphorical one in the moment and then it's taken out and now becomes the moment of interaction.
Yeah, yeah. We we don't really get away with the interaction with the ideology then though, don't we,
because they they presumably they know a lot of the time re-enact the same expressivity at home in the same and loads of performance.
Yes. No, I mean this is a both bringing into these groups but also then who is refused
submissions and maybe nobody would ever think of it in terms of refusal of admissions.
But it does is naturally selecting the.
Thank you, and I'll just look at the chart with the matter of why the string quartette at the ensemble of residence,
is it the fact that it has just an exclusive history? So is it about making the best music accessible?
So we're coming back to the Marxism idea here.
I think that I think there is an element of that and is interesting thinking about the canonical status of the String Quartette repertoire,
which I think is fairly unassailable in lots of ways.
There are some people on the fringes, but it's very much to do with the predominantly ostrer German canon.
But obviously there are other people within the and cutting the kind there as well.
And it is interesting that it is so associated with that heritage. However much it gets expanded and diversified is still that idea of being cool.
And I think there is something to be said that that's one reason why it has been within a university setting,
doesn't mean it doesn't still have a place within a university setting that it can.
Is then also interesting as the raises the question, but why not another type of ensemble?
There is something about that idea for people playing equally,
which I think the ideology surrounding that and the canonical repertoire means that the culture has a really special place and thank you and.
At the moment, I can't see another question. Please put your post your questions so that we can feed them through to Laura.
One other question I had was this interesting tension about the North and the potentially more cosmopolitan south
that seemed to be a sort of bit of rhetoric of metropolitan isn't being mapped onto the island and then the north.
And and then the interesting choice that nevertheless the Lindsay quoted when it is chosen,
is picked from one of the London conservatoire and is transplanted.
So, you know, what is the the ideology there or what is happening there?
It's interesting that almost all of the I mean, residents of turning around in Liverpool, Fitzwilliams.
Lyndsey's are all London Sabata trained and some of them, and then it ends up Surrell Quarterly.
I mentioned this morning, I think study with the Fitzwilliam.
I mean, you get into that kind of genealogy of string quartettes where they both studied with each other and then go on some positions.
And it's partly because they're the Sydney griller of the Academy, who's a renowned chamber music coach and violinist himself,
who's been at the critical time, which is very successful in the mid century.
And so it's just a self-perpetuating idea that actually, if you want to be a to learn how to play quartettes,
those are the places that you go to and that changes that shift when you start getting people like Chris Rolands at the RNC.
And that becomes sort of different centres of gravity in terms of what kind of music coaching is happening.
But certainly in this particular period, is the academy primarily slightly less than music,
which seemed to attract people who are interested in playing quartette repertoire and becoming quartettes?
And I think a large part of this also has to do with the idea of how you become a quartette as a professional quartette,
that it does entail a great deal of study of repertoire, but also crucially, how the ensemble comes to work together.
I mean, this is you you've sort of put your finger on one of the sort of difficulties again there, don't you?
Because there is a sort of sense if one play devil's advocate, where one could look at this entire programme and say, wonderful,
this gave the highly trained,
very elitist education and trained players a wonderful sort of sounding board where they could go and try new repertoire.
Right. Play it quite badly until they played it five times and then they can go and take it to the real audience who properly appreciates it.
Right. So it's a sort of dangerous out there.
And I found that interesting in the tension that they like to have the young quartette that is itself being trained,
but they also like to use the North as its training ground.
Is that is that a difficulty? How do you reconcile that?
And have you found anything where they are not just using it in terms of learning new repertoire and bringing you, you know,
trying out new and difficult repertoire such as the Shostakovich, for example,
and also delivering or developing new ways of delivering the performing.
You did mention that they started talking to them and that was a new thing.
They had to do verbal introductions and. But does it go beyond that?
Are they gaining something else from that and reading and try it around?
I think there's a lot to be said for the audiences that build up around these groups,
which are fiercely loyal and is partly, but they're also making music themselves.
But it's also that they actually really care and invest both emotionally and sometimes financially in these groups.
There's a great sort of civic pride and a protectiveness of them, a.
I wonder whether you can say that actually, yes, this experimentation, a willingness to try new things and open mindedness there,
rather than just expecting the latest Clipse offering from off the continent whose time it happens to be in London.
But actually the idea of supporting a team, if you will, which I think is important without wanting to.
Suggests that there's any reason why the people of Manchester or Stoeckle Sheffield should not have
as fine an appreciation of Quartette repertoire and playing as anyone anywhere else in the country.
But I think so it's interesting in terms of who travels and what kinds of practises get built around it,
but also an idea of what the function of culture is,
that if you look at the industrial cities and the importance of having access to culture is really pronounced,
and that has a lot to do with actually introducing it to people. The people do need to be educated and you can't just assume that people know things.
And I think that's a great strength of the musical cultures within those kind of cities.
And it's one reason why these quartettes get the reputation that they do,
because actually, if they hadn't had the opportunity of playing, of being tested,
of having to talk to people in the audience after the in the interval in the bar of actually trying to engage and explain what they do,
then that can only enrich the kinds of ways they present themselves wherever.
It's interesting saying in that clip, when I think it's the viola players, as I sometimes I quite enjoyed playing up,
dressing up for concerts, but actually I also quite enjoy these more informal sessions.
Sometimes it's much easier for them to be in a more formal session because they
don't have to engage is much harder to do that kind of audience engagement,
particularly if you're primarily a performer and haven't thought about talking to people.
In that way, yeah, I hope that's something that has changed in today's education system.
Yeah, it's interesting that that the development of a civic pride that you point to there and the idea of a protectiveness
and that I think that parallels that you do that with supporting a team is is a really interesting one.
And I wonder, does it do you get a sense of reading the first hand account of people who are starting to support
these groups and that they see themselves as sort of more globally connected through this as well?
Is there something that sort of goes beyond your Jewishness or is there more of a sort of national rhetoric?
And in of having these Home-Grown String quartettes that start to tour the country and and that you have helped to promote,
that you have helped to to bring to where they get to?
I think you can go every every way.
That can be pride in the fact that the quartette who you've watched over the years has ended up winning an international prise.
And it's a kind of we have them first. We understand the best mentality, too.
But there's also, I think,
a large part of China music is about we want to keep these groups for ourselves and don't necessarily want to share them with people.
So I think there is an interesting tension between wanting to have a local base
and then having the international reputation and the hardness of the touring life,
as well as a sort of certain routine and returning to places which can be quite reassuring and knowing that there are
supportive audiences and that you will get an audience is something that can also be really important for groups group.
So I'm not necessarily sure it's true, but of sort of nationalism.
I think this is something where regionalism can really play a strong role in terms of thinking about how groups are received.
Thank you. Alexander Douglas has just posted a question. He would like you to talk a little bit more about the function of listening as opposed
to hearing in these settings with the quartette step out into these new environments.
There's a lot that could be said about the difference between listening and hearing, I suppose.
If we think of the conventional black tie concert experience and how we think of in a very stereotypical way,
of course, that there's an idea of a dedicated, attentive listener that has come about through the 19th century and is still the primary
way in which we think about how we should consume quartettes in the concert hall.
In terms of hearing quartettes, it's difficult.
I mean, if we think of quartettes as background music and they still can be very much coded in class terms as involving black tie and everything else,
and we're thinking must be kind of receptions and quartettes obviously also have
a part to play that is a different kind of less attentive background listening,
which you might think of more as overhearing, if you mean actually because I've mentioned overhearing,
there's that sense of being part of quite a private musical experience in performance,
which I think as we keep on using the word ideology of the string quartette is
actually quite fundamental to the idea of how folk people make music together.
And being able to have access to that overhearing is something that I think is something that is really valued within the quartette context,
although it's not a word that gets used very often. Thank you.
Maybe we can finish with a final few words, what is your sense then?
This idea of residences, of course, is something that is there with us that we still do in institutions across the country.
How do you think that has changed the purpose of these residences?
Has it changed or how do you think it should change?
What do you think their role and function can be today in our changed landscape?
I think actually the kinds of things that they do and that they should be doing are very similar to what
was being done in the late 60s and 70s in terms of having a sense of supporting music making on campus.
However, that's defined and interacting with composers in the creation of new music staff and students teaching students,
but also what now is called outreach activities actually now has much more to do with
going into schools and accessing people at the primary school level particularly,
but more than anything else. And that's a result of changes in the music education system and the fact that we don't have the same kind of
music provision that was around in the 70s and 80s for people to actually learn instruments in the first place.
So I think that is actually feeding through from school education,
through university system means that the function of the quartette in residence is change as the
most substantial thing I can think of in terms of thinking about community building and building,
sort a technical and historical musical awareness and knowledge, then that's something that still quartettes and residences do quite extensively.
One thing that I think has become more true in recent years and was less true once the audiences got in so much that they say they were very,
very long time. And that did change. As I sort of mentioned at the end of my paper, the way that the court has worked within the institution,
because there was a history that people knew them very well.
There were certain things they weren't as willing to do when they were touring a lot as opposed to when they first started out.
Now, a lot of young quartettes will be in residence for three years or so.
And so that goes back in some ways to the original scheme.
Q Which is is the chance for a quartette to build their own reputation in a supportive environment where they can experiment,
but they can also just study. And that's something that I think is could be lurking in some of the residences which
are here to have actually that support a foundation on which to build a reputation,
I think is something where residences and universities are still really important, which,
of course, is a wonderful thing for the quartette of Hollywood, which is a chamber group.
It is. It's the thing that makes it slightly more difficult to think of the places,
the local communities of the residences, not just as a sort of trial ground, right?
Yeah, the football team is never going to leave, but the quartettes might get to the point where they come back maybe once a year,
if that, you know, so they they they leave their hands behind in a certain way and in some way.
It seems that these residencies are designed to train someone who is going to go and leave there, their fans and their loyal followers.
Like most students, it's a very similar process. But yes, it does change and it changes the constitution of the community around the group.
And there's obviously things that are lost with that. But in some ways, it could also be a sort of healthy learning process.
Yeah, thank you. I think you've spoken to the sustainability of the residents.
Is there a lot, a little bit to the psyche that has been through that we are going back to to something that was originally envisaged?
And do we have any further questions? Giving it a few seconds to see whether anything else is coming through.
Otherwise, I think we should probably say a huge thank you to Laura for this really fascinating,
stimulating paper, which I think has an old Tom Hyde has written that you haven't answered his question yet.
Shall I read the oh, can you say something about the sustainability of these residences when Scott had left?
Did they automatically get replaced by another quartette? It varies a lot, certainly amongst the.
Yes, but are a place by the cattle down. The Fitzwilliam, I think were replaced by the Surrell, but I'd have to check it other places.
Sometimes it's a bit of a agap quite often.
Now universities have applied for sort of short term contracts for these groups rather than something that's just a rolling.
There will be a residency and it varies according to institutions.
And the question of how could such maintain relationships with the institutions that they've left is also an interesting one,
because usually what if there is another quartette in residence,
then that tends to supplant the opportunity to return, but it's not impossible for that to happen and for them to continue with.
Building connexions with the communities I worked with as amateurs or whatever,
so it's difficult and is also something where the funding becomes critical in
terms of finding other foundations that will support it or even more rarely,
funding institutions that will support it themselves. And of course, it raises interesting questions then about the reception from the audience.
Right. Is there scepticism when a new group comes in and a sort of sense of loss that
the one that you have established that relationship with and who you have
seen grow is is the party or is is it built up in such a way that actually it's the excitement off of the new quartette as well as the new repertoire?
That was the tension that we've had? One more question come through.
And John Whittle writes, I'm interested in the aspect of the ensemble building and audience then then growing great with them,
maybe a wide issue across music making with choirs, including amateurs.
Yes. No, it is a is an interesting issue, an important one.
And I think actually one thing that really struck me when I've done work on the 1920s is that
people already then are complaining about the graveyard's haired audience for classical music.
So I think there's a time of life thing where people actually have the time and the money to spend
on going to subscription concerts that they don't have when they're earlier in their careers,
were raising families or whatever.
So I think in some ways, yes, it is a concern and it is something where you always think that you are wanting to attract younger audiences.
But there does seem to be a kind of consistent turn to certain kinds of conversations
with people at certain stages of their lives in terms of the audiences,
in terms of musicians. But sharing with the audience is, of course, that's a very deep way of creating a bond with a particular audience or community.
And there's a lot to be gained from that in terms of those long term relationships.
And with a quartette in particular, it doesn't mean that you really do get a sense of how the ensemble matures and changes with changes in personnel.
And all of that is so very hard to predict what will happen in terms of how that all works out.
And so I think it's something where, as with almost all of these topics, you can argue it either way, pluses and minuses.
And I think it's something that is worth being aware of, not being afraid of that ageing population,
because I think actually that still is a major contribution, hopefully will remain a major concentration of audiences and people who appreciate them.
I wonder on that note, to what degree is the rhetoric of the sort of child prodigy comes into it?
Is there a sense that actually this renewal through residencies where you always have the young group,
is something that is coveted by by particular audiences and particularly by audiences
who don't have maybe the sort of wealth of five concert halls in their city,
but that there's a sort of sense of seeing the new thing, seeing the the exciting thing in the very unusual thing in that youth.
Because, of course, what strikes me is the discrepancy between the older audiences, if it is a time of life thing and the youth of these groups,
if they're coming straight after their degree and moving into one of these residencies, certainly today,
they often do what you know, what is the dynamic in that divide and what relationship does that inspire?
I think relationships of patronage can be very important in this instance in terms of adopting
a young group and seeing how they mature and the excitement of that and seeing what happens.
And you can see that a lot in the histories of quartettes, where they started out as a young group, they start to get appreciated.
Somebody then loans them instruments. That takes them on to another level. They win a competition that takes them on.
So there's that sense of support, which I think can be very important.
It takes a while to become an established quartette. I don't I can't think of any kind of real prodigy quartette that just tends not to happen.
There is a sense in which it is about the group working together on the whole,
rather than the kind of virtuosity from the idea myself, you know, you certainly don't don't have them in their teens.
But but this is a similar thing, right, that you have the quartette in the fifties and the quartette in his late 20s.
And I think that, you know, within that world, the one in their late 20s are the wunderkind and eclipse.
Yeah, that's. But yes, this a slightly different idea of what youth means.
But I mean, that's quite often the case. Yeah. Thank you.
And of course, the idea of patronage, if that plays into that,
becomes another way perhaps of inhabiting those worlds in the same way that you were sort of drawing those networks between
what people come and spectate and look in on and then take home and re-enact possibly through the acts of patronage,
that there may be similar senses of identification with what is happening in artistically that.
Yeah, very interesting. And. I cannot see any further questions at the moment, we have five minutes to four.
I think we are going to say a huge thank you to Laura for really stimulating paper that I think
has set up the symposium really very nicely and lots of the strands that you brought out.
We keep coming back over the next session. Thank you very much to everyone for attending and listening.
And we hope to see you in the next sessions.