Music fills the campus grounds, the freshly trimmed grass, the graffitied practice rooms, and the hall’s front steps. It’s the sounds of various instruments, cellos, violins, violas and more, all forcing harmonies and melodies through the air. The beautifully woven sound waves and their pleasant result highlight exactly what I love about chamber music camp.
I began my first year of camp the summer of 2021, entering with low expectations. That was, until I joined the Mahler Piano Quartet. This group was truly special. I became close friends with everyone in the quartet and participated in a really fun environment.
That being said, we also got a lot of work done. While I enjoyed the members of the group, I found the quartet itself to be relatively difficult. When playing chamber music, you encounter many roadblocks. Firstly, you have to learn your individual part. Once you’ve tackled that obstacle, you have to figure out how to blend and mesh your music with everyone else’s.
Though working together proved to be the most difficult aspect of chamber music, it was undeniably the most rewarding. Every day, we would practice together
for hours on end, although I admit we often became distracted and laughed with one another. We ranged from drilling difficult passages to putting a pencil on the piano and seeing how high it would bounce. The best part? Our practice room was the only one with air conditioning. After two weeks of (mostly) hard work, it was time for the concert.
It was the type of hot day where even the mosquitoes were reluctant to enter the sweltering heat and attack us humans. Roughly 40 musicians were crammed into the basement of an old, but not really pretty Vermont church. Without warning, everyone took out their instruments and started the incessant tuning. The ear-splitting harmonic fifths of A’s E’s D’s G’s and the occasional C’s rang through the overcrowded basement. A combination of nervous and excited energy floated through the air—one could say we were “nervocited.”
After tuning our instruments, we all climbed up a steep set of around 20 stairs to the humid chapel. Given a designated section to sit, we filed into our seats. The other chamber groups came and went, and suddenly, it was my turn to go. Anna, Johann, Zachariah, and I quietly exited the main hall, on a mission to retrieve our instruments. Zach, who looked like Beethoven, was standing quietly in the corner with his piano music, ready to kill his solos. Anna, a talented violinist, was ready to nail all the high notes. Johann, the cellist with the most amazing vibrato I’ve ever heard, was ready to nail down the base notes.
Then, there was me.
By far the least experienced of the group, I was feeling optimistically confident about everything, praying the concert would turn out a success. Suddenly finding ourselves on the stage, we sat down, just like we practiced (yes, we even practiced such a mindless part of the performance). The beginning notes, which went something along the lines of ‘dunn dun dunnnnn,’ were soon followed by each member’s finely tuned parts. Johann began by playing his bass notes, soon indicating that it was my turn to add in. After nailing my entrance, I queued in Anna. Then, as practiced, we moved forward in unison.
We were not playing our individual parts at the same time. We were playing our parts as one, as one giant machine churning out beautiful music. Our nerves were masked by the perfection of the piece, displaying our hours of dedicated work in the form of harmonies and connection. Fortissimos and sforzandos danced throughout the chapel as Anna and I traded off our parts. Never breaking eye contact, we played the music together. We dug into our strings and played our hearts out.
Thinking about that moment still gives me chills to this day. Have you ever experienced a moment so real, so pure, so majestic, that your body tingles even just thinking about it? For me, that was this concert. We absolutely killed the piece. We did so because we played from our hearts, and music from the heart brings people together like nothing else.
