Since 2005, the world-renowned Cassatt String Quartet has come to West Texas for a bi-annual residency. Cassatt in the Basin has enriched the lives of adults and students in the community through concerts, workshops and other music events across the region. On October 29 at 3 pm, the quartet performs at the Wagner Noël Performing Arts Center in Midland, Texas. Admission is free, details are here.
One of the alumni of Cassatt in the Basin programs, the violinist Dominique Valenzuela, recently conducted an interview with CSQ’s cellist Gwen Krosnick. The interview was for a community engagement class that is part of Valenzuela’s Master’s degree program at Juilliard. He gave the quartet permission to share the interview with the public.
Dominique Valenzuela wrote in an email to Gwen Krosnick, “As I was giving my presentation it made me realize the impact that the Cassatt has had on my life. To give a presentation on your quartet at the Juilliard School… I could have never imagined that it would be possible, and I am grateful beyond doubt. I am so grateful to have such wonderful role models in my life.”
Here is the interview, edited for context and clarity.
Dominique Valenzuela: What is the Cassatt String Quartet’s philosophy in presenting chamber music to the community?
Gwen Krosnick: Sharing what we do with different communities - from elementary schools to assisted-living communities and beyond - is centrally meaningful to the Cassatt Quartet! We treat these concerts with the respect and love that we bring to every concert we play. At each one we curate a program of music that we hope will allow these audiences to connect to this music we love.
DV: How does the Cassatt String Quartet see chamber music as a vehicle for social change?
GK: Chamber music is very literally an art form that hinges on our ability to connect with other people who have different backgrounds and different perspectives than our own - often wildly so! Our rehearsals and our concerts, and the way we interact with each other and the communities we play for, are a microcosm of listening to the ideas of others with generosity, thoughtfulness, and joy. For communities to engage with chamber music - which includes a great range of music across hundreds of years through today, gives us access to catharsis, meaning, and inspiration. This can only deepen the connections and strength of those community ties.
DV: What kinds of concerts does the CSQ present in the community?
GK: The Cassatt String Quartet has been on the roster of the New York State Council for the Arts (NYSCA) for years. That funding and other major grants from sources throughout the states of New York, Maine and Texas (for which my colleagues brilliantly write applications!) allow us to focus our community partnerships in these areas.
These three states have special personal and professional meaning to us: New York is where the CSQ is based (the quartet itself, and all our members live in the greater NYC area). Maine is the site of the Seal Bay Festival of American Chamber Music, at which the CSQ has been in residence every summer for 20 years. Texas is where Jennifer Leshnower, our second violinist, is from and where her non-profit organization, Cassatt in the Basin, brings us twice a year to work with string students in the Permian Basin.
In each of these areas - and very often at other series and residencies (such as through the Treetops Chamber Music Series in Stamford, CT, for instance) - we play concerts at assisted-living communities, schools, children's museums, community centers, and other venues that aren’t conventional spaces for live music-making.
DV: How do the Cassatts hope to impact communities in the future by building on your already-sturdy foundation?
GK: One thing I love about the CSQ is that we have built long-term relationships with the audiences and communities. I love playing for new audiences, too, in new places - we all do!
There is a real depth to the relationships built over time. This has been such an inspiration for me, both in West Texas with the string students and public school music teachers, and at retirement communities where the quartet plays every single summer in Maine. Returning again and again to places where the quartet has played for years has a deep resonance and opens a capacity for community-building that is even more meaningful.
DV: What is the Cassatt’s mission and hope for the world, especially given that the quartet is historically all-female?
GK: I'm not certain I can speak for the whole Cassatt String Quartet on a worldwide mission, given that I have been in the quartet for two years out of its forty! But I will say that my colleagues and I share a belief that art and music matter: that the arts provide something that the world and humanity need. The way music sparks conversation and gives us access to emotional places where we might not otherwise go is centrally and vitally important.
The fact that the Quartet, named for the 19th century American painter Mary Cassatt, has been comprised totally of women instrumentalists since 1985 is important to our story. We feel both a responsibility and a real pride in sharing music composed by a diverse range of American women. I hope that audiences will hear music by Dorothy Rudd Moore, Florence Price, Fanny Mendelssohn, Victoria Bond, Joan Tower, and Tania León (just a few of the women whose works we are performing this season!) and really understand that this art form of classical music, which has traditionally been so exclusionary and indeed prided itself on inaccessibility, in fact has the capacity to be wildly, celebratorily, and endlessly diverse. It is a living, breathing, ever-changing thing, chamber music!
The great music within the field of chamber music is made more profound by a wider and more diverse, passionate community of musicians, audiences, composers, and music lovers taking part in shaping its future.
DV: How do you curate a program for different audiences?
GK: For all our concerts, from our most convention and formal performances to outdoor parks and senior centers, we give our most passionate, personal playing. We offer repertoire that we cherish, including music that the audience may not have heard before, and we talk directly to audiences at each concert from the stage about what we love in the music we are about to share with them.
Sometimes presenters will ask for a specific piece, or for us to play with a specific collaborator, and of course that comes into our conversations about programming! But mainly we think about how different pieces of music will tell a story to an audience - an open-ended story so that each person can experience it in a different and personal way.
There are practical considerations, like how long is the concert at next week's assisted living community. How young are the kids at next month's childrens' concert - and therefore what are their attention spans? What works will be “in our fingers” for a given date, so that we can really play our best?. Once those factors are accounted for, we simply put together a program that we love, so that an audience member can feel the joy and love for this pouring off us and feel a connection to the music we share with them. I feel VERY strongly that this basic goal is not different for an elementary school audience or at the fanciest concert hall we play!
DV: How does engagement with audiences of various backgrounds further impact your greater mission as leader in the arts?
GK: In much the same way that we love playing chamber music BECAUSE of the access it gives us to different perspectives and different emotional places, it means a lot to us to play for audiences that show us – through their unique backgrounds and vantage points - new reactions, new insights, and new love for what we do and the music we play. For the Cassatt Quartet, getting to play for and connect with so many diverse kinds of audiences, each with its own energy, response, and chorus of reactions, makes us ever more motivated and committed to reflecting - in our programming, and in our mission - that diversity of energies, reactions, and voices. A musical field that reflects, echoes, and amplifies the communities for whom we play is more sustainable, more electrifying, and more profoundly meaningful as we step forward into the future.
