I realize I go too far in claiming ownership of four string players at the Mimir Chamber Music Festival in Fort Worth, Texas. But I did coach them quite a lot over the last two weeks, and this is their only chance to show the audience of colleagues, coaches, family, friends and local chamber music lovers what they have learned this July.

The summer of 2005 was my third as an artist faculty member at Mimir. Along with eleven colleagues, I worked with approximately twenty students, almost all between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two. All of them auditioned for the festival, either live or via recording. Like the students in years past, most had professional aspirations, but few had experienced anything like Mimir. Executive director Curt Thompson has focused the festival exclusively on chamber music, which provides the students an opportunity not found at festivals where they must also prepare solo repertoire and attend orchestra rehearsals. Of course, with such focus comes greater challenge. Since students study only two works during their two weeks here, and often perform only parts of those two works, both faculty and students desire to have all the rough edges polished smooth.

We began with a big block of stone. One player in my group had never played chamber music before, and the ones who had brought varying levels of experience and proficiency. The Debussy quartet was new to all of them. And even though I had performed the Debussy many times, I had never coached it. At our first meeting, they had had only two hours together to read through the piece and begin what would be, both for them and for me, a maiden voyage.

We were looking at less than a week—only three sessions of two hours each—before my group would perform some portion of the piece for students and faculty. We would then meet two or three more times before the culminating public performance. I knew that other faculty would see my group on the days I did not, but at the final performance, I would be the one in the audience receiving uncomfortable glances should there be any train wrecks on stage!

Rehearsal time without a coach was limited to two hours each day, the bare minimum for the Debussy. This was necessary because each student participated in two groups during the festival. Thus every day contained four hours of rehearsal with a coach, plus four hours without. Every session at Mimir, whether coached or not, must build measurably toward the performances.

For members of a permanent, professional ensemble, preparing a piece of chamber music is second nature: after the first reading, most of the major building blocks are in place. Such a group may jump immediately to the fine-tuning of phrases, the blending of sounds and the delicate balancing of dynamics. Not so at Mimir. The first reading, even by accomplished individual players, is likely to derail several times. As members of the faculty with long memories, we are responsible for warning the students that these things can and will happen to them. But I do not think we have ever shown them the video from the very first Mimir, where during a faculty performance of an obscure Scandinavian quartet, four brave souls fought desperately to keep things together while one (or more) were hopelessly lost. It’s not whether you fall in, but how artfully you dig yourself out!

As a coach, my job would be twofold: to guide my four players toward a performance of their work and to teach them how to teach themselves. I had to share my experience working with other players so that these four might work together. I remembered my frustration at age eighteen, berated for my every dynamic choice by the more experienced members of my quartet and by coach Felix Galimir alike. However, a fog was lifted with his words: “You must have three ears! Two where you sit and one where I sit.” From then on I learned to pursue and teach awareness. Only by honing a constant awareness of their group’s true sound could my students hope to recognize and solve problems.

At the first session, I was impressed with the spirit and energy evident in my students but dismayed by the rather shapeless mass of sound. I immediately shared with them my opening strategy for such pieces, what many call “wood-shedding”. Before the very first reading, I get a score and “read through” the piece in my head. While not particularly talented at score reading, lacking fundamental piano skills and totally inept while looking at more than four or five parts, I can still get a sense of the challenges that will confront me. I mark my part with simple directions for cues and balance. At this point in my narrative, the player without chamber experience broke in, “That sounds like homework!” “Yes it does,” I answered, “and you haven’t done yours yet! Why should you expect to get through Debussy on your first try, much less make sense of it?”

So we began the work together. We started with the premise that no problem left unrecognized could be solved. I asked them to rehearse as if I were not there, so that I could sense their style of communication. As a full-time symphony player, this is a hassle I have largely left behind! In my job, there is only one person stopping and starting the group, and while not always enjoyable, the process is efficient. My group quickly made the same discovery: when one player stopped the playing to make a comment, all was well. But if the playing simply broke down, the first priority was to figure out why. I generally favor solutions through playing over talking, and with my Debussy I sensed that I had a quartet reluctant to make bold and immediate proclamations. So I imposed the “fifteen-second” rule. Only fifteen seconds of talking allowed before the playing resumed. This left time for one person to recognize a problem, suggest a solution, and provide a starting measure number. If another player disagreed, he or she waited until the proposed solution was tried before suggesting another. This rule had three benefits: more problems were recognized, more solutions were tried, and the group best benefited from the most valuable resource it had: time to play together. I often tell my groups that they could do much worse than to spend their two hours playing a movement ten times in a row, from start to finish. My colleagues and I have all been members of groups where so much time was wasted on unproductive arguing that a series of playthroughs would have been absolutely therapeutic. As another of my coaches at Curtis (and Orion Quartet violist) Steve Tenenbom said, “Practice the language you will speak to the audience.”

My summers at Mimir have shown me that the ideal use of time in a coaching is similar to that in a rehearsal. My first summer, I often found myself looking at glazed eyes while in the midst of paragraphs of explanation. Finally it dawned on me that I was transgressing my own rule. Again and again, I found the violin to be my best friend as I picked it up to demonstrate exactly how I wanted a passage to sound. What could be more effective than distilling hours of my own practice into a few demonstrations? I found myself acting in coaching sessions as a “virtual quartet member”: unburdened with the responsibility of playing but sharing the same respect for efficiency. I possessed the “third ear” that Galimir had described. Many exchanges resemble this one: “Second violin, can you hear the viola?” “Yes.” “Something doesn’t match between you; listen as the four of you play it again and tell me what it is.” I learned that when I gave a student the task of listening to just one other player, even when four were playing, the concentration and results increased dramatically. The next step would be to decide who each player should listen to at any given time.

I showed my quartet how this question is often answered visually through a sign, or cue. This sign may signify the beginning of a phrase, a shift in tempo, or the release or cutoff of a long note. What difficulty most of us have in understanding just how sharp and incisive a cue must be! As a beginner, my cues were plaintive and questioning. After being browbeaten by my colleagues, I learned how to give any manner of sign, depending on the character of the music to follow. But it was a strange discovery that sometimes, a sharp sign must be given even when the music is not so. There are moments when the need for precision demands it. I often paraphrased Crocodile Dundee as I demonstrated increasingly obvious cues:

“That’s not a sign. This is a sign!”

Now that our signals were in place, we got to the real meat of rehearsal. The cellist may have successfully given a sign and the others followed it, but why the cello and not the viola? We could not ignore the subject of balance any longer. In early classical quartets such as Haydn and Mozart, the first violin line dominates most of the time. Is it any wonder that the quartets of the time were composed of a strong first violinist (who often lent his name to the group) and three supporters? Even though quartets rarely work this way today, such repertoire is helpful for the beginning quartet since its clean lines and relative scarcity of tempo changes promote confidence and good rehearsal habits. But the piece at hand was by Debussy, whose aim was often to blur the clean line. As a master of color, he knew well how instruments could combine to form a sonic impression independent of melody.

“We have a long way to go,” I said in one of our first sessions, stating the obvious. The time had come for action and results. The fifteen-second rule was in effect. I showed the inexperienced group members how I mark my quartet parts, and then we played the marked sections. A shape began to emerge. “I wish I had recorded yesterday’s playthrough so that you could hear what has happened to this section!” I cried. “No you don’t,” replied the cellist with a smile. A veteran of several summers at Mimir, he was familiar with the rapid gains most groups make in the first couple of days. The challenge then, as always, was to keep the group working as if they were still just beginning. I asked them to completely mark their parts for the two movements we would work on this week, and to spend tomorrow’s rehearsal continuing the kind of rehearsing we had just begun.

By equipping my quartet with efficient means of interacting and productive rehearsal methods, the preliminary work was dispatched as quickly as possible. And with efficiency would come solidity. Though the conventional wisdom “haste makes waste” was drilled into me from childhood, I had come to learn that solutions which come quickly tend to stick. No wonder those early quartets took not only the names of their first violinists, but their playing styles as well: like a symphony, a totalitarian regime is more efficient and unified than a democracy. But where is the art in that? My four players would soon have to make the painful transition from workers to artists of Debussy. The danger of conflict loomed, but with it appeared the promise of exploration and discovery. And while I would equip my quartet with more subtle and varied rehearsal methods to encourage this discovery, no method would prove more important than a practiced awareness of what was actually coming out of their four instruments. Just before their final performance, each of the four players had an answer for my last question: “If you were listening from here, what would you say?”

This article appeared in Chamber Music magazine.