Listen to the individual voices of a string quartet. The instruments are talking to one another, says J Freivogel, violinist with the Jasper String Quartet.
“When you see a string quartet play live, you really see a conversation that's happening between the instruments. I think it’s quite a bit more thrilling to see a quartet and hear a quartet live than to hear it on a recording,” he said. “As you study music, as you listen to music, you become not just a musician, but a music lover. I think it touches an almost spiritual part of who we are as people.”
Freivogel with Rachel Henderson Freivogel (cello), Karen Kim (violin) and Andrew Gonzalez (viola) comprise the Jasper String Quartet. On Friday, October 4, they will be sharing their musical conversation in celebration of Temple University Center City‘s (TUCC) 50th anniversary.
The Quartet formed at Oberlin Conservatory and launched their professional career in 2006 as Rice University’s Graduate Quartet-in-Residence. Today they are the quartet-in-residence with the Temple University Music Preparatory Division of the Boyer College of Music and Dance, located at Temple Center City. The quartet provides Center for Gifted Young Musicians students with valuable insights into music, performance and career building.
During the October 4 program, the Jasper String Quartet — recipient of Chamber Music America’s prestigious Cleveland Quartet Award — will perform Lyric String Quartette (Musical Portraits of Three Friends) (1960) by William Grant Still; Carrot Revolution, a 2015 composition by Gabriella Smith that was commissioned by the Barnes Foundation; and Quartet No. 14 in A-flat Major, Op. 105 (1895) by Antonín Dvořák.
“It was the fall that we moved here when we were performing for PCMS (Philadelphia Chamber Music Society) — they had us give a master class at the Center for Gifted Young Musicians. We were incredibly impressed by the students and when we were invited to help teach the program we jumped at the opportunity,” said J Freivogel. “The Music Prep program is a big part of what we love about Philadelphia. It is made up of just supremely talented elementary, middle and high school students.”
Over the years, J Frievogel said, the quartet’s involvement in the Music Prep program has significantly increased.
“We teach many students privately within the Center as well as coaching chamber music. For the students, they may not all go into music as a career, but many of them are of the caliber that if they wanted to go to conservatory they are at that level,” he said. “It's a really fun program to be part of. I have great appreciation for all of my teachers growing up and it’s nice to be that for future generations.”
The students who participate in the Music Prep programs “are very serious and very hard working,” said Rachel Freivogel.
“There are many guest artists who come in, giving the students access to playing for artists from all around the world,” she said. “It's just a really supportive, wonderful place. It brings people together who are all really serious about music and it gives them a strong sense of community.”
Building a Musical Community throughout Philadelphia
While the Freivogels live in Philadelphia and Kim and Gonzalez live in New York, the quartet continues to host an annual concert series in Chestnut Hill, the Jasper Chamber Concerts, a series of performances “dedicated to encouraging curiosity, community and inclusivity through world-class chamber music performances.”
“When we moved here in 2013, it was very important to us to be connected with the community where we lived. Our career at that time consisted of us flying to many places, playing a concert, doing some outreach and then going home,” said Rachel Freivogel. “Then we would talk to our neighbors and they were confused by what we did. We wanted to be able to share the music with our community and have them understand it as us, as people as well as musicians.”
The environment that has built up around the concert series “is incredibly trusting of us,” she said.
“We have a very nice atmosphere where we feel free to play anything and people are really open to it,” she said. “We always talk about the works that we play, which I think is important. — I love talking to audience members afterwards and just hearing their honest reactions to the music.”
During their performances, the quartet is committed to presenting great works by diverse and underrepresented composers alongside the traditional masterworks of Schubert, Beethoven, Haydn, Mozart and Bartók.
“If I sit down and look at all of the music that I learned growing up, it’s, of course, all wonderful music but you realize it's all written by white men,” said J Freivogel. “Being aware of the needs of society and the needs for art to represent everybody, it’s an essential part of our performing that our programs feature pieces by a wide variety of composers.”
Having these eclectic and fascinating compositions from today “written by composers who we know and we don’t know is a big change from when I was in conservatory,” said Rachel Freivogel.
“There are many more resources now to find composers who are less known and doing that little bit of extra work to uncover new voices is so worth it,” she said. “I’ve discovered so much music that I didn't know existed that was written in the 20th century, or even the 19th century and, of course, lots of music from today. All of these works deserve a passionate advocate and our quartet is dedicated to playing and sharing these wonderful works.”
In 2023, the Jasper String Quartet broadened their outreach further, adding their Community Connections program to the chamber concert series in order to bring performances to underserved schools and community centers throughout the greater Philadelphia metropolitan area.
“One of the most important things to realize as a musician is that no matter where you're performing, you can be making a real impact on somebody's life. Coming out of school and through our early career, sometimes for me the most powerful performances were when we were not necessarily in a concert hall,” said J Freivogel. “It was those occasions where we were able to interact; maybe it was with school children or maybe it's in a retirement center or something else entirely. We call them concert conversations because really we're playing, we're talking about the music, they're responding. It makes for a nice flow of musical dialogue.”
The Community Connections program, he said, was developed to “bring the programs we were doing in the chamber concerts into the community a little bit more.”
“We've had wonderful partnerships in this initiative with WRTI and Allegro Music Consultants. Both have helped facilitate us bringing the music to a larger number of people and bringing it to where they are,” J Freivogel said. “It's important for us, whether we're playing for elementary school students or retirees, that we play the music that we play in our main concerts. We never want to dumb down our art form — we spend our lives devoted to it and we want to help people understand why we love it.”
The Art of the String Quartet
According to J Freivogel, string quartet writing “is an art form that composers have often turned to as one of the truly great musical presentations.”
“Beethoven wrote 16 amazing string quartets; then there’s Haydn and Bartók and so many others. There's nowhere to hide in a quartet in terms of your composer’s technique,” he said. “You have to have great mastery of music in order to write a great string quartet. I have found that as one gets to know music’s layers more profoundly, the meaning, power and impact grows in kind. Composers love expressing their art through this medium.”
There’s a “great sense of generosity within quartets,” said Rachel Freivogel.
“I like to think that we're giving the audience a hug — we’re sharing something that we love. It's interesting and inspires me to think of a different voice and how I can think of the world in a slightly different way,” she said. “So, I would hope for our audience that they come into that experience and be inspired, or feel better, or just enjoy hearing the music, whether they've heard it before or it’s completely new to them.”
The string quartet is the perfect artistic example of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts.
“I think one of the reasons we love quartet playing specifically is you have the ability to be playing your individual part but, in putting it together with your quartet mates, you can create sounds and sonorities and emotions much greater than as an individual,” he said. “Unlike an orchestra when you are part of a much larger section, it's almost like every person in a quartet is 100 percent in charge of the sound that we're making. It is a very artistically fulfilling career path, because you have that artistic freedom and control over what you're doing.”
Rachel Freivogel also equates the interactions between the members of the quartet and the audience to a conversation.
“I love the sense of the dialogue within the quartet; that you're always giving things to other people and receiving feedback,” she said. “I think that's just a really interesting way of moving through the world and getting that feedback is always really valuable. I think I am much more able to communicate a large scope of emotions through music than through words, and I really enjoy that.”
Of their quartet mates, J Freivogel said, they are “amazing musicians and wonderful people.”
“Karen Kim won a Grammy and is a big advocate of new music and commissions — she is a great force for keeping our ideals at the forefront of what we’re playing,” he said. “Andrew Gonzalez is a supremely gifted player — it’s almost like the music comes through his bones. He can play various instruments, and he has this ability to just comprehend music on a different level in a wonderful way. The compilation of all of us together, we each bring different parts forward and that’s what is wonderful about playing in a quartet.”
To learn more about Temple’s Music Prep program, visit here. Learn how you can support the program here.