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Thursday, September 25, 2014

Inside the Quartet - NYTimes.com

Inside the Quartet - NYTimes.com:



'via Blog this'



Communication in ensembles is important.  How do you communicate with fellow musicians?

Follow the link to the Quartet and listen and watch how the members of the Kronos Quartet cue each other in performance.

"Founded 40 years ago, the Kronos Quartet has broken the boundaries of what string quartets do, commissioning hundreds of new works that have brought jazz, tango, experimental and world music into the genre. The string quartet, based in San Francisco, has released 57 albums, sold more than 2.5 million of those recordings and has become a mentor to several generations of quartets that have followed in its innovative wake."
"One day earlier this year at a studio in downtown Manhattan, the members — David Harrington and John Sherba, violinists; Hank Dutt, violist; and Sunny Yang, cellist — were game for an experiment: to create a video that would serve as a new way to explain the special mystery of how a quartet communicates. ​ They found themselves surrounded by a battery of laptops, video cameras and microphones as well as sensors that turned their movements into data that eventually rendered the players kind of as "dot clouds" who would appear and disappear according to their individual participation in the music. "
Suddenly, they began discovering things they were doing unconsciously to cue each other into the musical entrances.