Violinist Ross Snyder of the Tesla Quartet chats with KGNU’s Iris Berkeley and guest interviewer Braintree Jim of WOMR. Ross discusses the group’s upcoming performance in Denver on September 12th as part of the MAS Presents series. He reflects on the Tesla Quartet’s evolution and their diverse repertoire, ranging from traditional Viennese composers to modern pieces focused on climate change (Interview date: 9/2/2024)
Iris Berkeley: I am Iris Berkeley. I have WOMR’s Braintree Jim here in the studio as my special guest host, all the way from Provincetown, Massachussets. And I believe we’ve currently got violinist Ross Snyder of the Tesla Quartet joining us on the phone. Ross, are you there with us?
Tesla Quartet (Ross Snyder): I’m here.
Iris Berkeley: Oh, fantastic. I pushed all the right buttons in the right order. It’s such a pleasure to have you here. Thanks for joining us on the holiday. We’re wanting to check in with you in advance of your performance. The Tesla Quartet is performing as part of KGNU Presents Thursday, September 12th at the Savoy, Denver as part of the MAS Presents series. But you’ve also got deeper ties to the Front Range. You were in graduate residency here in Boulder at CU from 2009 to 2012. Am I right?
Tesla Quartet (Ross Snyder): Yes, that’s correct. That’s 15 years ago already.
Iris Berkeley: I don’t even want to think about that. And your cellist, Austin Fisher, was assistant principal cellist of the Colorado Symphony until he joined the quartet. So you’ve got some deep ties. What’s it like coming home?
Tesla Quartet (Ross Snyder): Yeah, it’s great. I wish we came back to perform in Colorado more often because it just feels so nice to be there. We really loved our time in Boulder. It’s just great to play there. I think the last time we played in Colorado was at the end of 2019. So we’re really looking forward to being back. It’s always such a pleasure to return.
Iris Berkeley: Do you have anything that’s on your bucket list that isn’t related to the concert that you want to go back to?
Tesla Quartet (Ross Snyder): I don’t think we’ll have time on this trip to head back to Boulder to any of our stomping grounds, but, as long as we get a glimpse of the Front Range. I think that was always one of my favorite parts, returning home from a concert tour or a competition: cresting over the ridge, driving up to Boulder and the mountains laid out all in front of you.
Iris Berkeley: Absolutely. It’s funny you mentioned that because my co-host today, it’s the first time he’s ever been to Colorado and we had to pull off the road at 36 where you’re talking about.
So as well as you, Ross Snyder, and your cellist, Austin Fisher, the Tesla Quartet is violinist, Michelle Lie and violist, Edwin Kaplan. You say you’ve been together for 15 years, not entirely in that configuration. How long have you been the four of you as you are now?
Tesla Quartet (Ross Snyder): Austin’s the newest member and he’s coming up on two years. In the new year, he will have been with us for two years. Edwin played his earliest concerts with us in late 2013. And Michelle, since 2011. I started the quartet shortly before I moved to Boulder. I was in a master’s program at the Juilliard School in New York, and three of my colleagues and I put a group together and felt like it had legs and wanted to see where it would go, so we applied to the graduate residency that the Takács Quartet runs at CU Boulder, and were lucky to be accepted to that program. After our first year of existence, coming out to Boulder and getting to work with the Takács Quartet for years, was an incredible experience. Michelle joined during that time. She and I actually knew each other from going to school at the New England Conservatory a few years before. As is often the case with young groups in their first couple years finding their footing and figuring out how all the pieces fit together and whether personnel to continue, when you’re that young, there are so many options for where you want to go musically.
We eventually settled on a good configuration, with Edwin joining just a year after we left Boulder. This has been nice, with the three of us a good 10 years, 11 years at this point. We’re thrilled for Austin to be in the group now, too. I feel like, as you hope, every year the group grows, the music making gets bigger and deeper. So I think we really enjoy that about what we do.
Iris Berkeley: And after a decade and a half, you’ve been awfully busy and have this exceptionally broad repertoire of both new music and really established music. But as time has gone on you’ve acquired a reputation for this commitment for amplifying underrepresented voices overall. This more recent focus on climate change. How did you get to this place after a decade and a half? How does that develop?
Tesla Quartet (Ross Snyder): Playing music by living composers has been an integral part of our programming since the very beginning. In our first year as an ensemble when we were still studying in New York, we premiered a piano quintet by Gabriela Lena Frank, and it was a great experience to work with her. She came to Juilliard as part of a festival of new music. Then as graduate students in Boulder, we played a number of works every semester by student composers as part of the new music series at CU. We’ve always had a great relationship working with other composers and we love being able to bring a brand new piece to life.
We’ve always felt that maybe there is some message we can send in our programming that goes beyond music for its own sake. Maybe there’s a way of contributing to the dialogue to help mitigate changes happening to the climate. So we talked to a number of composers about whether they would want to write a piece based on their feelings about climate change. We’ve always gotten a really positive response. Last year, the University of Maryland Clarice Performing Arts Center commissioned two Maryland-based composers to write works for us to premiere that focused on how climate change is affecting the Chesapeake Bay.
Alexandra Gardner and Adrian B. Sims each wrote a quartet. And it was a great experience to see how the fabric of a community is tied to not just the people, but also the environment and the land and how everything coexists. That was a good inspiration for making this music come to life.
Braintree Jim: This is Braintree Jim speaking with you. My home station, as Iris mentioned earlier, is all the way on Cape Cod, WOMR. And it’s a thrill for me to be able to join you both this evening. My question for you is, what can folks expect at the Savoy on Thursday to September 12th?
Tesla Quartet (Ross Snyder): We have a program that is contrasting to our discussion so far this evening. It is actually a work of more traditional repertoire, but great music that is all around the theme of light and darkness. All Viennese composers from different eras. We have Mozart, Schubert, and Anton Webern.
All of these pieces show different sides to the duality between major and minor or night and day, dark and light in various ways. Mozart, he famously wrote few works in the minor key compared to his whole output. He generally approached music in a major key and he has very few quartets in minor keys. This G major is unabashedly open and sunny and charming. And then contrasting that, we get on the first half of the program, the “Langsamer Satz” by Anton Webern, this late romantic style that is constantly dipping in and out of the key of E flat major. From the very first notes, you think, oh, this piece is in C minor, it’s going to be dark. By the end of the first phrase, you find yourself cadencing in E flat major, and then it’s just always moving. Every time he touches one area, it melts away, and he’s moving on, so it’s very fluid writing. It’s subtle like the light changing in your room as a cloud passes by or something. It’s got that same feeling. The second half of the program is Schubert’s great G major string quartet, his last string quartet that is in G major, although he spends most of the piece just flip-flopping back and forth between whether it’s really in G major or G minor. You’re like, what does that mean? He’s always creating space for major and minor to coexist. Thats what ties the program together.
Iris Berkeley: Yeah. And this is a lot of very different repertoire, because you mentioned in your note, you’re also performing at performances this fall, like George Crumb’s “Black Angels” and Steve Reich’s “Different Trains”. Those are all extremely different pieces of music. There are a lot of different things happening this fall. What’s on everyone’s mind this fall as you put together these performances?
Tesla Quartet (Ross Snyder): Yeah, it’s time management and carving out space and time to get your head into one mode and then be able to switch to another. Thankfully we’re not going back and forth from city to city with program to program. The concerts in September just feature the Viennese program and then focusing more in October with Reich and Crumb. If we can get those performances closer together, then we have momentum for each program and the ability to focus on each one.
Iris Berkeley: You sound awfully busy. You also did a four year residency in North Carolina, which is the opposite of a bunch of concerts. What’s it like getting to know a community in that kind of timescale?
Tesla Quartet (Ross Snyder): Yeah, that was great. We were the quartet in residence for the metro area of Hickory, North Carolina, which is a town about halfway between Charlotte and Asheville. Similar to Boulder, the Piedmont area of North Carolina. We were there from 2015 to 2019 and it was such a wonderful experience to spend so much time in the community. We not only performed, we got to curate our own series of chamber music concerts throughout the year, which was great because we could play as many quartets as we wanted or invite guests to come and join for quintets. We also did a lot of educational programming. Lots of elementary schools, particularly introducing second grade, but often they would just bring the whole school to listen to our performances and we visited community colleges and senior centers.
It was all really getting ourselves ingrained in the community and trying to reach as many people as we could. We also played as principals in the Western Piedmont Symphony. We were flexing our orchestral muscles a little bit while we were there as well, which was also a great opportunity. While the focus is on the quartet, it’s really great to play orchestral repertoire. There were just so many things that this residency allowed us to do.
Iris Berkeley: Yeah, and I didn’t even think about that. I’m sure you do get itchy occasionally to play in an orchestra after being in a quartet setting for so long.
Braintree Jim: Is there anything else you’d want our listeners tonight to know?
Tesla Quartet (Ross Snyder): Oh, we just hope that you’ll come to the concert. MAS Presents has made some t-shirts with a special Tesla Quartet picture on them. So you can only get this merch through by making a donation to MAS Presents, and I think all of that information is on their website, but then you can get this cool t-shirt as a thank you gift.
Iris Berkeley: Nice, I did not know that.
Tesla Quartet (Ross Snyder): Also, there I think are going to be some craft cocktails before the music. We’ll have to wait until after the performance ourselves, but, come and have a good time. I think it’s going to be really fun. It’s a non-traditional venue and I think the vibe is going to be a lot of fun.
Iris Berkeley: That sounds absolutely fantastic. If anyone from MAS is listening, please keep some cocktails on ice for these guys.
We have had the great pleasure of talking to violinist Ross Snyder from the Tesla Quartet. He will be joined by his colleagues, violinist Michelle Lie, violist Edwin Kaplan, and cellist Austin Fisher, for KGNU Presents Tesla Quartet, Thursday, September 12th at The Savoy in Denver as part of that MAS Presents series.
Ross, thank you so much. I’ll let you go cause we’re about to give away some of those tickets, but again, thank you so much for hanging out with us, especially on the holiday. It was a pleasure to chat.
Tesla Quartet (Ross Snyder): Oh, thanks very much. I really enjoyed it.
Iris Berkeley: Take care.
