Eric Lewis, a favorite bluegrass and blues artist in Door County, is again joining the Griffon String Quartet for concerts this weekend. Eric and the Griffon have been teaming up now for several years, and these concerts mark the release of their second joint recording, “Under the Harvest Moon.” There is a special chemistry when they perform together and audiences are coming to see that. Some of the performances are already sold out because the word is out about how exciting these performances are.

I remember the first time Eric and I talked about the possibility of this kind of collaboration. I think he was on tour and driving somewhere across Pennsylvania on the way to his next gig. As we talked, I was delighted to hear that he had already started working with an arranger friend of his to include a string quartet in his show. We started making plans to create a whole program featuring Eric with the Griffon.

I also remember being at the initial rehearsal when Eric got to first play with the Griffon and hear these arrangements in real life. After the first run-through of the first song, I thought he was going to cry. I don’t think he was quite prepared for the beauty of the string sound meshing with his own playing. Plus, the Griffon played it all so beautifully right from the first time through. But in the years since that rehearsal, the relationship and the synergy between Eric and the Griffon players has only deepened. I was quite sure that the Griffon would be very adept at getting into the style of Eric’s pieces, but it was a bit of a surprise to all of us when it turned out that Roy Meyer, our first violinist, started showing that he was also quite a natural country fiddler. Now, Eric and Roy sometimes trade off on solos as if they just came from the Grand Ole Opry, and that is a plus that no one (probably not even Roy) anticipated.

When some people think of a string quartet, they think of Haydn and Beethoven, which certainly makes sense given the role they both played in establishing the string quartet with great masterpieces. This is fine unless we start to pigeon-hole the group as only being one that plays “classical” music. One of the things that has been a problem for chamber music in general is that its image has transformed over the years into something quite stuffy and exclusive to many. Unfortunately, to some people, a chamber music concert conjures up a large concert hall suitable to accommodate a 90-piece symphony orchestra with 2,500 seats for the patrons. But instead, seated on an empty expanse of stage are four lonely string players in formal wear, probably older males, with beards and spectacles (okay, maybe I’m going over board to make a point), playing Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. The concert ends with polite applause, and the musicians leave the stage and go out the stage door while the audience goes in the opposite direction out the front entrance. Chamber music has just been committed in the most distant and antiseptic environment possible – as far from its origins, in the “chamber” or “room,” for which it was intended. One of the most intimate forms of musical expression has been rendered in a gargantuan and soulless environment.

I was recently reviewing a study done by the Knight Foundation from about 20 years ago that was jointly funded by several large symphony orchestras. One of the conclusions was that about 25% of the population was quite open to symphonic music, but only about 10-15% actually attended concerts. As a kind of side note, it mentioned that only about 2% attended chamber music concerts. As I thought about this, I wondered if this was a status quo that we are locked into. But then I thought about how things would have looked back about 200 years ago. If anything, those percentages would have been the opposite. Chamber music was enjoyed in many homes and modest town gatherings. However, rarely did anyone get to hear a symphony orchestra. Remember that Beethoven had to hire a pickup orchestra to perform the premiere of every one of his symphonies. There was no Vienna Philharmonic. It didn’t even come into existence until 1842, 15 years after Beethoven’s death. The Berlin Philharmonic came 40 years after that (1882). Very few people got to hear symphonies as they were originally intended. That is why Franz Liszt (and others) transcribed the Beethoven Symphonies for piano, and why many orchestral works were arranged for chamber ensembles. It was the only way most people could hear them. At the same time, chamber music was in homes, town halls, churches, and taverns.

However, by the early 20th century, many professional symphonies were in existence. They were reasonably well funded and helped spur the building of many suitably large concert halls to accommodate them. At the same time, a number of professional string quartets were formed. Touring was often a big part of their activity because they were small and agile as far as travel, and they were quite (relatively) inexpensive to present. These tours frequently took them into the symphonic concert halls because these halls were also presenters who brought in guest programs to fill out their schedule and generate extra income. The string quartet began to become associated with the venue of the symphony orchestra. An early 20th century patron might hear the New York Philharmonic one night and the Kneisel String Quartet (the leading string quartet in New York at the time) the next night. Guess what. The Kneisel couldn’t match the sonic richness of the New York Philharmonic, and the subtlety and finesse that it did produce was lost in the expanse of the vast concert hall.

Then came the university. Quartets came and went. They struggled because of lack of support. Whereas symphonies had boards of directors and large institutions behind them, string quartets might have a singlebooking agent. It was a hard and inconsistent life even for the best of them. Enter the university residency. A number of quartets were adopted by universities as faculty members in their music schools. They providedexcellent string teaching and were also given time to rehearse and perform as a quartet. The Juilliard Quartet, the Cleveland Quartet at Eastman, the Vermeer Quartet at Northern Illinois University, and the Pro Arte at UW Madison are a few examples.

While this has offered a solution of sorts, it is also not without its faults. In the university, the quartet is being subsidized. It is not directly beholding to the support of a wide audience of supporters in the outside world. Yes, they may have some outside benefactors and an audience of local afficionados, but they are not largely reliant on a significant supporting concert-going public. This can have implications for what they play and where they play it. They play a very important role, but their support situation may play a part in confirming among the general public that chamber music is very specialized and isolated in certain confines or among certain constituencies.

Alleviating this situation to an extent and helping to restore the wider inclusion and acceptance of chamber music as something less appropriated by the few but enjoyable for the many, is the work of a number of chamber music societies. These are independent groups that support chamber music concerts for the general public. In doing so, they are dependent on gaining the interest, good will, and significant support of a wider, general-public audience. To a large degree, this is the type of organization that Midsummer’s Music is, and our programming, presentations, and approach all show that we are far from the “niche” type of chamber music perceived by many, but more closely aligned with the origins of chamber music as coming out of the family and a multitude of various elements of society as an intimate activity.

The whole idea of the chamber music society as a support group presupposes that there is a larger audience for chamber music that can be tapped into. It suggests that the 2 percent identified by the Knight Foundation can be much larger, indeed, much closer to the large audiences and numbers of practitioners from the 19thcentury.

Part of what is helping in this effort is what is called the “Crossover Movement.” I am not particularly fond of this term, but I understand what prompts it. It involves the incorporation of elements of different kinds of music into a particular genre. The problem is, it is partially based on the creation of, what seems to me, too many distinct genres. Music is much more malleable than that. In a recent column that I wrote, I suggested that Mozart might have incorporated some exposure to Welsch folk songs into a few of his operatic arias. At our final concerts of the season, we featured Paul Schoenfield’s Café Music. It is so much crossover that it turns the term on its head. On the same program we heard the Brahms Piano Quartet in G Minor which is so outrageously “Hungarian” in its last movement, but we don’t think of Brahms as a “crossover artist.”

At Midsummer’s Music, and especially with the Griffon Quartet, we are trying to open up the experience of chamber music. We are working to eradicate the stifling preconception that it developed over the years, andreplace it with a wider and airier sense of the pallet that is available to us as composer, performers, and audience. It’s a big, expansive musical world out there for us to enjoy and one that invites us all to relax into.

Jim Berkenstock,
Artistic Director, Midsummer’s Music