This semester I am coaching a chamber group through my school Ithaca Talent Education. In the fall our most advanced orchestra ensemble splits into small groups and the faculty coaches them.

My particular group is an unusual combination of two violins and two cellos. I was given the opportunity to choose the repertoire, though there is not that much rep available for this instrumentation.

We went with the Vivaldi Concerto for Two Violins and Two Cellos Rv. 575. 

I’ve worked with chamber groups before, but I have never coached one over the course of the semester. In total I will have 12 meetings with them. 

The students are relatively new to chamber music.

I want to name five priorities I established to help guide us this semester. These are a combination of Suzuki principles applied to chamber groups and lessons I learned especially from working with the Miro quartet in undergrad.

Use a reference recording

I want students to listen to their quartet music in the same way they listen to their solo repertoire. I figured this would greatly speed up the time to play notes accurately. I brought a speaker with me to our first session and we took 10 minutes to listen while looking at the score. I sent links to recordings afterward so hopefully they continue to listen like crazy at home.

Lead from the bass

This was the biggest lesson I learned from the Miro quartet. Many ensembles take their leadership cues from the first violinist. But, in reality, the largest instruments (bass, cello, then viola) are the slowest to move. Their strings take the longest to respond. The ensemble will blend much better if you actually empower the cellist to lead the group. This is true for rhythm, intonation, and musical shaping. I introduced this theory of ensemble organization on day 1.

Practice scales together

I’m really inspired by this video from the Miro quartet which shows them practicing in scales. They give a few strategies: play in octaves, play in unison, play in chords, and then invert the chords. But in the video you can see an amazing demonstration of just how unified they are. I showed this to the quartet and we built a practice of playing scales at the beginning of each session. I showed them the video so they could be inspired, too.

Build a robust environment

The teacher is not the teacher. The environment is the teacher. Teenagers respond so much more to dynamic quality and peers than they do to authority figures. It was important to me to get them to local concerts. This fall alone we’ve been visited by the Dover quartet and the Knights. There was also a chamber music concert put on by an ITE alum (still in college) that we all attended together.

In the effort to build a robust environment, I also wanted the quartet members to get to know one another. I had them fill out a questionnaire on day 1 and they shared a few of their responses with each other. We also worked on how to give appropriately timed responses. And on days where we had two hour long rehearsals we built in time for a snack break where they could just hang out and talk with each other.

Skill = 10,000 repetitions

Finally, it was important to me to reinforce one of our most fundamental principles. That talent is, indeed, educated. That we must practice behaviors thousands of times in order to turn them into skills. This is no less true in quartet playing than it is in solo playing. I was often frustrated in quartet ensembles growing up that we didn’t give ourselves time to truly practice things. We would play a passage. Stop to talk. Everyone would have an opinion. And then, to my dismay, we would just move on. With the quartet I counted repetitions, asked members how many times they thought we should practice each chunk, and brought a baby abacus for students to use to count for each other.

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I have a lot to learn about chamber coaching, but naming these fundamentals helped me feel comfortable in the new role. A group lesson is simply the second lesson of the week. Treat it like a lesson. A chamber coaching is also a lesson– it just happens that there are four students present.

We don’t throw our philosophy of teaching out the window just because we are teaching in a different format. And we certainly don’t just revert to coaching in the way we were coached (poorly) at summer music camp.

I’ll keep sharing resources here that I find about coaching chamber ensembles.