The Art of String Quartet Playing: Practice, Technique, and Interpretation

by M. Herter Norton

"Full of meat, of precepts, explanations, advice; all of singular soundness and practicability, lucidly put, clearly brought to the musicians consciousness by the examples in the score." -- New York Times For the rapidly growing thousands (both amateur and professional) who find the deepest satisfaction of life in playing chamber music, this is the only practical and authoritative guide. Beginning with such elementary problems as who should sit where, what kind of music stands to use, etc., it goes on to such puzzlers as just how loud forte is, how fast an allegro , how and when an inner voice takes over the lead, and similar problems in the works of composers from Haydn to the moderns. Every musical point is illustrated with specific examples, and there are 132 musical quotations in full score. The idea for writing this book was evolved while Ms. Norton was training with Louis Svecenski of the Kneisel Quartet, and the manuscript was carefully gone over and heartily endorsed by Franz Kneisel, leader of the Quartet which set the highest standards of this art in the United States. The dedication of the book to members of the Quartet, three of whom had been the author's teachers, was inevitable. An earlier version of the manuscript was brought out by Carl Fischer in 1925; the present revised version was prepared in 1961-2.

Genres: Music

Paperback

First published March 1, 1966

Reviews

[Elizabeth · Rating 3 out of 5]

In general, Ms. Herter Norton gives good sound advice (no pun intended) on most aspects of quartet playing.

I particularly like this section:

Think of the forward motion of music as of a river. Tempo, as we shall see, is the current. Each player should feel his voice a tributary stream winding in and out and in again, part of a greater whole. He must enter without beginning and cease without stopping. He should feel as though that whole were emanating from his own mind, only his fingers being limited to his particular instrument. [Chapter Two: Ensemble, p23]

Although she is slightly opinionated: Consider the following:

Early quartet manuscripts, as we have seen, bore almost no marks; the texture was too simple, the musical thought itself too limited, it seems to us now, to make any great call on range of expression. But the technique of both composer and player grew as their means became more complex. We probably endow Haydn and Mozart with more variety of textural color than they received from the players of their own time, to just by the history of technique. We have unconsciously and inevitably applied our own methods, and as we have seen, it is no sin to keep their musical thought alive by our own warmth and by the variety of color we in our more complex state find necessary, provided we remain within the bounds of their style. [Chapter Seven: Color and Texture, p121]

Hmmm... maybe not. It seems a bit vainglorious. Why on earth wouldn't 17th century musicians not have had equal (if not more) warmth than musicians from this age? If anything, modern string players might be accused of being a little cold and calculating, in comparison.