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Charles Castlenian ’ s Qu t Program

A selectivc suminer session prorides “progressivc education” in a demanding ar,

Peter IŁ Mo»c

The campus of the Willard School: the place for quartets

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t is somehow łitting ihat the pro-gressive Emma Willard School in Troy, New York—the oldest U.S. preparatory boarding school for girls-should be the setting lor an cquallv progressive summer training program for string cjuartets. For just as in the early 1800sthe distinguished American educator Emma Willard decided that young women would benefit from a rigorous intellectual education, so too sonie twelve years ago the distinguished American vio-linisi Charles Castleman decided that young string players would benelit from a rigorous training in cjuartct playing. Before Miss WillarcPs bold

Peter Mose is a pianist and frequent irriter on musical suhjects. He currently lives in New York City.

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decision, young women were pre-parecl typically for little besides do-mestic life; before Castleman's. young string players were prepared typically for little besides solocareers. Both preparations were clearly found wanting, and now the visions of both Willard and Castleman have become realities: \ he Emma Willard School is todav one of the most piestigious of all girls' prep schools, and the Quar-tet Program has become probably the place for intensive work in quartet playing.

Correcting the balancc

CA astlenran's idea was to found a ysummer program that would give equal weight to private study and toquartet work under prominent coaches. Ile realized that high school and collcge-age string players often are so busy with other performance commitments that chamber musie— especially the unrivalcd quartet literaturę— can easily be slighted. Indeed, time and again over theensuing years he has found program applicants w ho have already achieved a remark-ably high proficiency level on their instruments, yet w ho have never played a quartet at all. *‘But that isn't surprising,” he says candidly, “sińce they were probably the verv best string players in their region, espe-ciallv those who came from outside

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major metropolitan areas.”

Aware also that young musi-cians benefit from hearing profes-sional-caliber music-making, Castle-man sought a campus for his Quartet Program that would be convenient to the summer festivals at Tanglewood, Marlboro, and Saratoga. After iwo seasons elsewhere, the Emma Willard School arose as a site ideally suited to the purpose. I he campus, with its im-pressive c^uadrangle of Got hic build-ings and handsome new arts center, has resounded with the quartet literaturę from Haydn to Bartok ever sińce.

Each spring, forty-eight stu-dents are selected from all over the U.S. and from several foreign coun-tries to comprise twelve string quar-tets. Out ofan applicant pool three to four times this size, Castleman builds these quartets on the basis of audition tapes, personal interviews, and refer-ences from his extensive network of musical colleagues. (“Students are al-ways asking me why they've been matched, but of course I never tell them," he says.) 'Phe groups stay to-gether all summer long. studying and performing one cjuartet during each half of the sevcn-week program.

“Part of the rigor ..

\ren't there tensions, bared emo-.tions, even fights among a cjuartet during the course of a summer? “Oh. surę, all summer long. But that*s part of the rigor of this profes-sion: learning to work well with colleagues who may be tempera-