Arensky String Quartet No. 2: Interactive Concerts in Public Education
Project Overview:
My project is both performance and education based. My project will be a series of interactive concerts that my string quartet will give at high schools and a final recording of the piece. Sharing interactive performances with children in public schools is important because it helps get them excited and shows them how fun music can be and different things they can do with music if they’re interested in continuing music in college.
About Arensky String Quartet No. 2 Op. 35:
Arensky was a Russian composer from the Romantic era who lived from 1861-1906. He was known for his chamber music and songs. Arensky loved Tchaikovsky. He wrote this quartet as a memoir to Tchaikovsky when he died. The instrumentation of this quartet is odd. Arensky calls for one violin, one viola, and two cellos. This instrumentation allows for a much deeper depth of sound and creates a somber, melancholy, and powerful atmosphere in this piece.
Project Post No. 1
2-19-2025
During the first week of this project my string quartet has been hard at work preparing the Arensky string quartet No. 2 Op. 35 for our interactive concerts in the schools scheduled in March. We have completed the first movement and are beginning our journey on the second movement
This past week in addition to rehearsing and reaching out to orchestra teachers my quartet went out and got professional pictures taken to use to promote ourselves and our performances
Project Post No. 2
2-25-2025
A clip of the 1st movement. My quartet is also all set to perform at Tucson High School and Flowing Wells High School. We look forward to sharing this piece with the students!
Project Post No. 3
3-4-2025
Some highlights from our rehearsal on the second movement. The second movement is a theme and variations movement. Arensky creates his theme based off ideas in the first movement and builds off that theme. The theme is a basic idea in e minor with just the violin playing arco in the first phrase and everyone else plucking. This clip also includes one of our favorite moments in the 3rd variation, Sam and I working on our false harmonics, and a sneak peak of the 2nd variation.
Project Post No. 4
3-18-2025
The Arensky quartet is proud to announce that we have completed learning the 1st and 2nd movements of our piece! Now onto the 3rd and final!
We are so excited to be performing in schools next week! Look out for pictures and videos in post no. 6!
Project Post No. 5
3 - 25 - 2025
This clip shows the Arensky Quartet using different rehearsal strategies to work the 2nd variation of the 2nd movement. First we slowed down the tempo which allowed us to tune in and really listen to how our notes line up with our colleagues. Next we played a scale using the bow stroke that we were going for.
Project Post No. 6
4 - 1 - 2025
The Arensky Quartet begins work on the 3rd and final movement. The end is in sight! Our first performance on the 3rd movement will be April 15th!
Project Post No. 7
4 - 8 - 2025
As we approach the end of the semester not all of our rehearsals are “as productive as they could be”. This week the majority of the members are playing in the opera here at U of A which means lots of late night rehearsals! Our latest rehearsal that you can see part of down below is a result of all of us being pretty tired, we still had fun though!
Final Project Post
4 - 22 - 2025
By the end of the eight weeks, we had officially completed and documented two interactive concerts in two different high schools and a beautiful recording of the first movement of Arensky quartet No. 2 from Haskell Recording Studio. Throughout the 2025 spring semester, we have been working hard on a large scale project of visiting students in our local area and introducing ourselves to new performance techniques in chamber music. Chamber Music is a lot different from orchestra, band, or even solo music. In our string quartet, each member is playing a different part of the same piece, making focusing on rehearsals early in the semester necessary for the rest of this project to be completed effectively. In March and April, we finally were ready to play singular movements to a standard performance level. During March and April, we visited two high school orchestras; Flowing Wells High School’s intermediate orchestra, and Tucson High School’s advanced orchestra. The goals for both of these schools was to start with engaging activities to immediately bring student attention onto what is happening in the music. For the first activity, we used animal sounds and had students mimic the volume and inflection of how each animal sound was made by each student. Afterwards, we had call and response, where students tried to imitate other students, then we had a follow the leader activity, and finally we got to perform for both the schools. An important learning moment for us was what went wrong with the call and response activities. At Flowing Wells, we initially tried to have students repeat phrases with moving notes, different bowings, and rhythms from the string quartet. We were immediately met with the reality that this wasn’t an effective way to carry out this activity. The next thing we tried was limiting it down to rhythm only for the THS performance, which was much more effective. The follow the leader activity was probably the most fun for students, as we had one student leave the room, and assigned a leader to another student. The leader would then lead other students to play a note in unison, all focused on making it look and sound just like the leader. The student would then come in and try and spot the leader. Despite the difficulty of this challenge, each student was able to find the leader with some guidance, and each student who participated got more experience with chamber music techniques. After an excellent couple of performances at THS and FWHS, our next goal was to explore the performance side. On April 14th, our quartet had the opportunity to go to the Haskell recording studio and have a first time experience as a string quartet recording together. It was an incredible experience! We got four takes, and despite the sound being dry in the studio, the sound on the video sounds amazing! We had a lot of fun completing this project. The teaching and performance aspects of the project made it very rewarding. View our final video below!
