Quartet Project update

I'm looking forward to returning to Providence in April. Since the last Quartet Project workshop at CMW in the fall of 2008, I've continued to make steady process towards the goal: creating a collection of new music that will make it easier and more inviting for kids (and beginning string players of all ages) to play chamber music. I've written over a hundred small pieces for string quartet; they begin at an elementary level and become gradually more challenging.

Playing chamber music–and string quartets in particular–with my friends is the reason I'm a musician today. Playing music by yourself is nice; it’s challenging; it’s absorbing; it can be fun. But playing music with others is something else entirely–like moving from flat paper into three dimensions, as if a silent, black-and-white movie suddenly burst into sound and full color! My aim with the Quartet Project is to open new doors into that world of playing together.

In the last 18 months, more than 40 quartets around the world have played pieces from the Quartet Project. Kids from Providence, to New York, to Grand Forks (North Dakota), to Vienna, to New Zealand have premiered pieces. And I've had the good fortune to get to work personally with most of those groups.

It's exciting to hear quartets play music that I wrote weeks or months before. I see the groups working to make sense of a piece they've never heard before. It's satisfying to be able to tell them, "Try it this way," or "Dig into the string there; don't be afraid to make an ugly sound," or just to explain what the idea behind a piece was. It's thrilling to hear the results; the music comes to life. I hear each member of the quartet catching hold of the sound.

The communication flows in the other direction, as well. I watch the quartets. I listen to what they have to say. I hear their rehearsals and performances. And then I go back home and think about how I might sharpen the music, make it more vivid, eliminate any awkward bits that get in the way of what I want the music to say. It's a rare opportunity in our current musical world. Most of the time, the first performance is also the last one. Thanks to workshops like the one at CMW, I have the luxury of taking a second look.

-Geoff Hudson, composer