The Art of String Quartet Playing

Title

The Art of String Quartet Playing

Author

David Blum

Published

Ithaka (1987)

Language

English

Last February, during a string quartet rehearsal, we decided that we were ready for some professional help. We found a violin teacher living no too far from my home willing to give us a lesson in which we would focus on the first two parts of Tchaikovsky’s first string quartet, which we were working on at the time.

The Art of String Quartet Playing, cover

She taught us a lot of valuable things, like how to experiment with different ways to play fragments and see which one worked best. She also gave us a collection of quartet exercises, something I didn’t know existed.

At the end, she also lend us a book, The Art of String Quartet Playing (Ithaka, 1987), which I just finished. Its subtitle is "The Guarneri Quartet in conversation with David Blum". Blum (1935-1998) appears very knowledgable about the subject and discusses various elements of quartet playing, as oppposed to symphony orchestra playing.

The book is a valuable resource for budding quartet players like us but can be a bit tedious to read. These are my notes:

There are not one but four primarii

It’s nice to look into each-other’s eyes, but you get more from looking at bow and fingers

Don’t repeat, react

Consciously use vibrato to colourise even the shortest notes (pizzicato!).

Speaking of pizzicato: when pressing the left hand finger down really hard, you can approximate an open string

Project piano passages into the entire hall: lots of bowing

I had hoped for more stories like the letter L incident, in which viola player Tree noted, during a concert, he didn’t have the first page of the Finale with him, only the second page and on, or the one about the ritardando in the fifth movement of (Beethoven’s) opus 131. Those could have given the book more colour.