Integrates visiting resident artists with a comprehensive chamber music curriculum.
The Visiting Quartet Residency Program offered in the ASU Herberger Institute School of Music, Dance and Theatre is a distinct program among music schools nationwide that integrates visiting resident artists with a comprehensive chamber music curriculum, providing the greatest educational chamber music experience possible. Each year, the Herberger Institute School of Music, Dance and Theatre at ASU engages a different major professional string quartet to serve throughout the year as distinguished artist teachers. The quartet works intensively with students on three specific projects designed to form the basis of a chamber music curriculum.
Each visiting resident quartet is chosen in conjunction with specific projects that not only fulfill a most comprehensive course of study, but does so with the top specialists in the field. Over the course of a four-year undergraduate degree, students will have worked and developed relationships with four different major professional string quartets, while covering all pillars in the chamber music literature.
The program engages students in the community through projects focused on the creation and performance of new music. Each year, composition students select works of art at the Phoenix Art Museum for inspiration in writing new music for string quartet, culminating in world premiere performances at the museum by the visiting artists. In collaboration with the Mayo Clinic to support their mission for humanities in medicine, students share their learning and music-making in a culminating performance at the clinic and hospital. The largest project involves over a thousand high school students invited to ASU to hear the resident quartet perform, hear ASU students perform alongside the quartet and to engage in discussions and learning about the music.
With the same quartet in residence throughout the year, the program also provides a unique opportunity for the community to experience three featured concerts.