The New School founded the Schneider Concerts in 1957, and now they have started the Sixty-ninth Season (2024-2025). The Verona Quartet presented the first concert of this season on October 6, 2024. The Verona Quartet is a music group consisting of four people: Jonathan Ong and Dorothy Ro, violins, Abigail Rojansky, viola, and Jonathan Dormand, cello. The works that they performed were: Ravel: String Quartet in F major (1903), Marsalis: “Creole Contradanzas” from String No.1, at the Octoroon Balls (1995), Adu-Gilmore: String Quartet “If the Stars Align” (2012), and Beethoven: String Quartet in E minor, Op 59, No.2 (1808).
Yu
This was the first time that I have gone to a classical music concert. Before the concert started, I took a look at the audience who came to listen to this concert and the performance venue. As it is a classical music concert the audience was not too different from what I expected before coming, mostly older people, approximately 90-95 percent were older, and the rest were younger. The big performer’s venue was the New School Auditorium, located at 66 W. 12th Street, in New York City. The large venue, was only about half full. I am not sure if this is because the Verona Quartet is not very popular or for other reasons.
As my first time experience, I felt some nice things and some negative from the concert. First, the most interesting for me in this experience was that I changed my cognition of classical music. Before the concert, I had not heard much classical music, so I always believed that this music was slow and made people want to sleep. However, during the concert, I realized that it was not. Classical music could also be fast-paced and inspiring. Also, before that, I could not think that the violin, viola, and cello, these kind of instruments could play the sound of plucking with the fingers, I always believed that it needed to use a bow to play. During the concert, when I closed my eyes to feel their music more immersively, I noticed that in my mind would appear the scene of pursuit from “Tom and Jerry”, which is a cartoon only with sound effects, but now I realized that when Tom and Jerry run and pursue, the sound effects were coming from these instruments. That is a very interesting discovery, before the concert, I never made a relationship between cartoons and classical music. However, not all of the music makes the connection to this image, only some fast music let me inspired by that image, this is also caused by I don’t remember all the plots of the cartoon Tom and Jerry, I just remember some classic plots like pursue or fight, and this usually uses some fast music to resonate the audience’s attention.
Of the four pieces that they performed I liked the first one, the “String Quartet in F Major”, written by Maurice Ravel the most. The “String Quartet in F Major” was composed in April 1903. Many people say this work is modeled after Claude Debussy’s String Quartet, but the differences between these two works are huge. The work by Claude Debussy is effusive, uninhibited, and opened a new step of classical music, instead, Ravel’s work was more traditional, expressed emotionally reticent. Debussy did not feel offended by the possibility that Ravel modeled his quartet after his own. He was very appreciative of Ravel’s work, so he sent a letter of encouragement to Ravel. Maurice Ravel was born in 1875 and died in 1937, he was popular during his life, receiving a lot of foreign awards. “Maurice Ravel is best known as a brilliant composer in two media: the orchestra and the piano (for one, two, four, and even five hands). His music style was a classical sense of form, a vocabulary of melody and harmony that is modern yet tonal, and a rhythmic motion full of vitality and subtlety.” His string quartet had a strong sense of order, which meant, fewer changes during the music and made its basic nature unchanged. For this reason, his mature and unique music style was the reason people continued hearing his music and reproduced his works.
Back to the concert. I think the performers were very professional and skilled, as the
biography from the website page in New School states. “The Quartet serves on the faculty of the Oberlin College and Conservatory as the Quartet-in-Residence. In addition to its position at Oberlin, the Quartet recently held residencies at Nova Scotia’s Lunenburg Academy of Music Performance, North Carolina’s Chamber Orchestra of the Triangle, and the ENCORE Chamber Music Institute.” With this information, we know that the Verona Quartet is very professional and they have a lot of performance experience. During the concert, they were wearing suits, and that sets the tone of the concert seriously, that is art time, not entertainment. After I came back home, I searched for a video of the Ravel Quartet on YouTube, and I didn’t notice any any differences in that performance from what.I heard unperson. That is another thing that shows the Verona Quartet’s professional ability and that they were fully prepared for the concert. But, what I felt in the concert and saw from the video was totally different. As I said in the previous paragraph, when I heard the piece in the concert it let me have some connection to my own experiences but when I watched the video from YouTube, I did not feel anything, I just listened to it, and it doesn’t make me had any inspiration. Compared to the live environment and watching the video at home, the live environment will give an immersive feeling, you will have a good memory about what you heard, and your feeling was real, instead of only watching the video, just watch it, but we will not remember of it.
Nevertheless, there was one thing that made me felt a little thing bad about the concert and that is that no one explained the process of the concert to the audience. For people like me, who went to a classical music concert for the first time without any knowledge of the work, even though I had a program, it is very hard for me to follow what happened, and what piece went for the next. I know that making sound during the performance of the piece will interrupt many audience’s immersive state. But, there is another solution, like using a projector or any display without sound to tell the audience which piece we are, and which go for next. That will be helpful for the audience to know which piece we are. Also, this is also the reason why when I came back home I needed to search YouTube for the same string quartet and the work that they
played during the concert because I never knew which song they were playing.
In the end, to conclude this concert was my first experience, I felt more positive things
than bad things, I would like to go to another concert after and compare it with this one, I will recommend it to my friends, I want to let them try a new thing that did not experience before and also I also want to know if they get the same feeling as me or some new feeling.
References
“RAVEL — Quartet in F Major.” Www.youtube.com, 12 May 2023,
www.youtube.com/watch?v=plATXmJAWe8.
“Schneider Concerts Presents | Verona Quartet.” Newschool.edu, 2024,
event.newschool.edu/schneiderconcerts-veronaquartet. Accessed 20 Nov. 2024.
“String Quartet in F Major – Maurice Ravel.” Earsense.org, 2022,
www.earsense.org/chamber-music/Maurice-Ravel-String-Quartet-in-F-major/.
Wikipedia Contributors. “Maurice Ravel.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 12 Oct. 2024,
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Ravel#Honours_and_legacy.
—. “String Quartet (Ravel).” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 27 Apr. 2024,
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/String_Quartet_(Ravel).
