delsolquartet

MF: Aspiring musicians are often advised to have a fall back career. Could talk about the role music played in your life when you were growing up? At what point did you commit to a full-time career in music, and what you were doing before the Del Sol String Quartet?

CL: This is a complicated question! My early childhood musical experiences consisted of a pretty narrow bandwidth of classical music: Mozart and Beethoven to Chopin and Tchaikovsky. I began playing the violin at age seven but went through several teachers before the spark was discovered. I began taking classes at the New England Conservatory Prep at age ten. Those two years of classes, which included chamber music and theory, probably started the long process towards a career in music.

In the seventh grade, my family moved to New Mexico and my music studies continued much more in isolation. In high school, I still enjoyed playing enough to consider pursuing a major in music in college, but was discouraged by the thought of practicing many hours a day. Of course, I also couldn’t imagine doing anything academic for many hours a day at the time. I put music on the back burner while I attended UC-Berkeley, where I studied Applied Math. It was only in my senior year, when I took a chamber music class, that the desire to play started to return.

After graduating, I decided to put off grad school and work for a high energy physics group at Los Alamos National Laboratory while I decided what to do next. During this time, we were running an experiment at Fermilab (near Chicago), and I was able to play quartets regularly with a colleague on our team and some others, including a violin professor at Northern Illinois University. This experience, coupled with spending some time traveling in Europe, where I had the opportunity to hang out with professional musicians and the fact that I was often working twelve-plus-hour days, all led me to go back to school to study music. Within a year of taking college music classes at the University of New Mexico, I was convinced that this was the right path and began preparing for graduate school in music, which wound up being at the San Francisco Conservatory.

MF: How did you found Del Sol? Were you just sitting around with some other musicians or did you think about it for a while before forming it? How did you pick the name?

CL: Three of the four original members of Del Sol were involved in a quartet reading session--over beers--at a quartet festival in Massachusetts, where it was suggested that we try to apply for a festival as a group, rather than individually, which would have meant being placed with random people. This idea took root over the following winter vacation when we got together in Los Alamos to rehearse and play a concert. The recording from the concert was submitted to the Banff Centre for the Arts, and by then, we were already making plans beyond for just a summer festival.

The name started as a bit of a joke, originally being Frijoles del Sol. Later, as we were still looking for a name, we shortened it to Del Sol, which was unusual--but acceptable. Finally, we just liked the fact that everyone lives under the sun and that it was a Spanish name while we are an American ensemble. A more traditional approach would use a composer’s name--Beethoven, Amadeus, Corigliano--or the name of a place--Cleveland, Budapest, Los Angeles.

MF: For a lot of people, when they hear the words “string quartet,” they think of canonical composers, such as Mozart, Bach, and Shostakovich. Yet, Del Sol specializes in contemporary twentieth and twenty-first-century music, and you work largely with living composers from all over the world. Was this a focus you chose deliberately or did it develop over time?

CL: We began more traditionally, but I have had an interest in contemporary music since my days at UNM, where I first became more exposed to it. Around 2000, we decided to make more of a direct contribution to the excellent music that was new and/or underrepresented. There are more composers writing today than ever before, but not that many groups who are willing to champion them. Ironically, in the classical period, audiences demanded new pieces, and it would have been highly unusual to perform a piece over fifty years old. As composers worldwide write music for the string quartet, we feel it is absolutely imperative that we try to bring some of this art to the stage.

MF: One of the benefits of working with living musicians and composers in the US and abroad is the chance to collaborate. Del Sol has worked with a lot of interesting people and had several works especially commissioned for it. Could you talk about the process of collaboration and some projects you’re currently working on?

CL: Collaborations take us to very different realms and opens our eyes to new perspectives and creative possibilities. Already, in our own repertory, we have to wear many hats as we play music from very diverse composers--each with their unique musical language. When we collaborate, we have to adapt to new ways of approaching the music as well. In this year alone, we worked with Daniel Bernard Roumain, a hip-hop violinist and composer along with turntablist DJ Scientific. We also had two new pieces written for collaboration with Melody of China, a traditional Chinese instrument ensemble. In both cases, they were excellent musicians with wildly different ways of learning and thinking about music. Coming up this fall, we’ll have some concerts in Mexico featuring the music of Arturo Salinas, who uses inspirations from indigenous tribes in Northern Mexico. We’ll also be collaborating with a didgeridoo player on a piece by Australian composer Peter Sculthorpe and with an accordionist on a piece by Norwegian composer Maja Ratkje, both for the Other Minds Festival in San Francisco. On a somewhat unusual note, we are very excited to be playing with Joan Jeanrenaud, former cellist with Kronos, in October, but we’ll be playing a Schubert quintet. Talk about going retro!

MF: In addition to your work with Del Sol--performing, making CDs, visiting schools--you also teach, do your own composing, and perform with other musicians. So, I’m interested in your creative process. How do you approach these different aspects of being a musician?

CL: Mostly, it’s a matter of doing whatever I can to keep going. Different creative aspects are not so difficult to juggle as trying to deal with the business side. It often feels like I’m on the computer a lot longer than my viola.

MF: It’s no secret that funding for the arts in the United States is declining--from cuts in elementary school budgets all the up to the federal level. As someone who is involved in the arts on a daily basis, what do you see as the social ramifications of this trend?

CL: We definitely see it in the schools, where it is immediately apparent in the response of the kids when we give a presentation. The difference between schools that have music programs and those without is staggering. Historically, the arts have been financially supported by the social classes with some luxury money, but we haven’t seen a significant interest from dot-com people. Imagine if Microsoft or Apple supported a resident ensemble that gave regular concerts and Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and others started to commission new works! There would be an amazing boom of art not seen since probably the 1920s in Paris.

MF: Since you’ve traveled all over the world to perform, I’m just curious. Have you ever had an instrument mishap while performing or lost an instrument en route?

CL: Unusual events happen in performance quite frequently: broken strings, wrong piece of music, microphone not turned on, not enough light, and all kinds of problems associated with changing climates. I don’t think we’ve ever had any mishap that ruined the show, though.

I personally have not had any serious problems with my instrument during traveling, besides occasionally having to convince airline attendants that my viola will fit in the overhead compartment. However, with the heightened security these days, it is getting pretty nerve-wracking to fly with a valuable instrument and there have been numerous horror stories of musicians unable to get to a concert because they were not allowed to bring their instrument on board or having their instrument damaged when taking the gamble to check it in.

MF: What are some of the projects you are currently working on?

CL: I mentioned most of Del Sol’s upcoming projects earlier. We have a couple big works coming down the pipe, from Cuban-American Tania León and Cambodian-American Chinary Ung, courtesy of the Fromm and Koussevitsky Foundations, respectively. We also have a world premiere in November of a piece by Persian-American composer Reza Vali, where we’ll have to play in an unfamiliar Persian mode, using non-Western pitch relations. Finally, I’ll be preparing some pieces--viola and piano--to play with my wife, Eva-Maria Zimmermann, for concerts in Europe around New Year’s.

Visit the Del Sol String Quartet website

Watch Del Sol perform with Daniel Bernard Roumain and DJ Scientific

Check out their CDs!

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