Two centuries of Beethoven, two decades of the Euclid Quartet By Kate Luce
Two centuries ago, Beethoven was well on his way to gaining notoriety with his compositions. This past school year, the Euclid Quartet dedicated their concert series to Beethoven and presented his music on and off campus. Around the world, many Beethoven concerts are popping up to celebrate the 250th anniversary of his birth. This past year, in addition to Beethoven’s anniversary, 2019 also marked the 20th anniversary of the Euclid Quartet. The quartet has been at IU South Bend since 2007, coming from Ohio. The Euclid Quartet is comprised of IU South Bend faculty Jacqueline Choi, lecturer in music; Jameson Cooper, senior lecturer in music; Brendan Shea, lecturer in music; and Luis Vargas, senior lecturer in music. “This past season represented the 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth, so we wanted to commemorate this by offering all his quartets. Music lovers and students from South Bend had the opportunity to hear this amazing collection of works which trace his style from a young bold new composer on the scene to a mature master dealing with deafness and mortality,” Cooper says. “The Beethoven Quartets are what many consider the bible of string quartets in all aspects, in terms of their scope, treatment of forms and conventions, range and depth of expressions, experimental instrumental techniques, programmatic inspirations, and historical impact on the future of string-quartet writing. Having established our identity and distinct group sound as a professional quartet through numerous concerts, tours, and recording projects throughout the past years, we found ourselves at the right place to challenge ourselves with a substantial project of preparing and presenting these monumental works by Beethoven in their entirety in a single season,” Choi explains. The Euclid Quartet ran the concert series from the fall of 2019 through the spring semester. With the unfortunate 64
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events of the Covid-19 pandemic, the final performances were cancelled due to the closure of the campus. However, the community and students enjoyed the shows they were able to see in the fall and were grateful the Quartet decided to take on such a daunting concert series. “We wanted to bring these amazing works to our community of South Bend which might not otherwise have a chance to hear the entire Beethoven String Quartet Cycle. That is the beauty of having a professional string quartet in residence at IU South Bend, we get to share the amazing works written for string quartet with our immediate community,” Vargas says. This is not the first time the Euclid Quartet has focused on Beethoven for their concert series. In 2009, they performed Beethoven all year long as well. However, this type of concert series is relatively rare for the Quartet. In the past years, the Euclid Quartet mixed styles of music and added contemporary pieces to their performances. Last year during their concert season, they performed three pieces that were exclusively written for them and other works that were performed for the first time. In addition, the quartet was able to collaborate with other artists during their concert series throughout the fall semester. In November 2019, they performed with Ketevan Badridze, interim Martin Endowed Chair of Piano, during the IU South Bend Piano Series. The Quartet and Badridze performed an outreach concert for John Adams High School in November as well. This was the first time many students heard live classical music, and the performance even brought one student to tears. Students from the outreach performance later attended the full Piano Series performances on IU South Bend campus. Beethoven’s work has been split up into his early period, middle period, and late period for this past year’s concert
