Step 3: Learning the music

Now we come to the hardest part of our journey. Learning the music. It is easy to pick out great music, buy the music, photocopy the music, and put it all in a notebook. It is a whole other ball game to learn that music.

We first start by just sitting down and reading the music through. This way we ll get an idea of which areas in our own parts need work and which parts are going to need to be practiced with the whole group.

When I use the word “learn” I don't simply mean know all the notes. The notes are the easy part! What I mean is to understand the story or spirit of the piece which we are trying to convey to you our audience. This is called the “musical interpretation” of the piece and it takes a lot of careful study and hard work. This part of the learning experience is constant and continues even as we preform in front of you. I'm sure We will be talking more about this part of learn in later posts.

Besides notes and interpretation there is articulation. That is, how each note is to sound. We spend many hours discussing and trying new articulation sounds. This is mostly fun and easy-ish but can become tedious quickly if you have to get your violist to match you or really anyone or anything.

There is so much more to share about the learning process but I want to save some stuff for later posts. This is just the beginning of a very long journey for the quartet. We will be posting stories and videos of our progress so you can follow along.

Below is a video of our second read through of the fourth movement to Haydn's String quartet Op. 74 No. 3. Everything within me screams not to post this because it is......well, it's just awful. And I'm not just talking about how we look! We sound bad too! And the online video quality isn't that good either! However, I really want you to be able to see the progress or at least pretend that we get better with time. =)