CANCELLED: Playing Through is the Easy Part!

In order to minimize health and safety risks from COVID-19 to our patrons, the larger community, and Duke students, faculty, and staff, Duke University has adopted new policies on spring semester classes, residential life, travel, events, and campus visitors. In keeping with the university’s directives, we are cancelling public events at the Rubenstein Arts Center through April 20. More information.

Join Duke University’s chamber music students for this special performance focusing on process. How do chamber musicians play together without a conductor? They communicate and rehearse, but how? Do they play straight in time? (Absolutely not.) And the first violinist is the leader… right? (Wrong again!)

Students will show and act out examples of the extra-musical techniques they use to find consensus when playing together begins with different ideas and approaches. The program ends with a unified, committed, and comprehensive performance.

What we see in concert is only the end result of a long process of the performing musicians coming together. They use many techniques in the process of learning something as a group, and that’s after they have learned their individual parts. If they are strong musicians, they all have different ideas. How do they put them together to perform as one idea? Or, are different ideas more compatible than we think? Trying different things builds our flexibility as players—and as humans, that flexibility gives us the freedom to discover that someone else’s idea might become our favorite in the end. Witness this changeability first hand in the work of these extraordinary students, with introductory remarks by Caroline Stinson, associate professor of the practice of music and director of chamber music.