The Skyros String Quartet, all third-year doctoral students in the Glenn Korff School of Music, have recorded their first CD with support from the Hixson-Lied Endowment and a Kickstarter campaign.
“As classical musicians, one of our main goals is to be on a recording at some point in our life,” said Sarah Pizzichemi. “It seemed like the right timing because we are going to be entering the work force soon full time. Having a CD is really great for demos and job opportunities.”
The Skyros String Quartet includes Pizzichemi, violin; James Moat, violin; Justin Kurys, viola; and William Braun, cello. They study with UNL’s Chiara String Quartet.
The Quartet received a Hixson-Lied Graduate Student Scholarly and Creative Activity Grant, which got the process started.
“With classical CD’s, they are never profitable these days, essentially,” Braun said. “So to start with the funding from the university was a really big thing for us.”
Seeing other successful crowdfunding projects, the group turned to Kickstarter to raise the additional funds from family, friends and even complete strangers online. They ended up surpassing their goal, raising $8,777 from 90 backers.
“It’s been really incredible,” Pizzichemi said. “We’ve been a little overwhelmed by all the support. This is really lovely of everyone from our past or even people we don’t know who are curious about our work. That’s also exciting.”
One backer had no ties to the Quartet.
“One of the most exciting donations, we got one donation from a random person on Kickstarter, who just came across it,” Braun said. “None of us knew who it was. Looking at their profile, they just have supported some random projects, and they chose ours.”
They recorded the CD from Aug. 7-14 at Engel Recital Hall at Union College in Lincoln with the help of Grid Studio and Producer Philip Zach.
“Engel Hall is a nice space, and they happened to be closed, so we could get in there and record with the Grid Studio,” Pizzichemi said. “We really enjoyed working with Philip a lot.”
They did sound checks both in the studio and also at Engel Hall, but ultimately decided they liked their sound better in the performance space.
“We wanted it to sound very passionate and realistically how we would perform, rather than a study,” Pizzichemi said.
Braun said the recording process was interesting, but they enjoyed it.
“It took us a few days to get settled, but we would choose our movement or whatever we were going to do that day, and we would sit down, do a play through, listen to it, generally discuss what were the problems, what were the things we could do better or what were the things we liked a lot,” Braun said. “We’d take notes and then repeat that process and go back through and start doing smaller sections.”
In the end, the CD represents what the Skyros Quartet wanted on each of the three pieces they performed.
“In the end, it is what we wanted,” Pizzichemi said. “Philip made sure it was always consistent.”
Hearing themselves on high-end recording equipment was also a new experience.
“We had never heard ourselves on such amazing recording equipment,” Pizzichemi said. “It was an accurate representation of how we were playing. It was like the most intense rehearsals we have ever done.”
“It’s really like what the audience hears,” Braun added.
The CD will include nine tracks, each representing a movement of three works by Benjamin Britten, Joaquin Turina and Jean Sibelius.
Sibelius’ string quartet is titled “Voces Intimae” and consists of five movements.
“It was the first, big 20th century string quartet,” Pizzichemi said. “It really brings in the elements of Scandinavian folk music, while still being a really lush, post-romantic piece.
The middle movement, which is slow, is the heart of the piece.
“There’s a part where the music just stops,” Braun said. “And the melody stops. There are these three, hushed, very quiet, low chords. On the score he wrote “Voces Intimae,” which means ‘intimate voices’ or ‘internal voices.’ That became the nickname of the whole quartet.”
Turina’s “La Oracion del Torero” (The Prayer of the Bullfighter) is a single movement that mixes Spanish flair with French post-impressionism and was originally written for four lutes.
“You have some of these really interesting impressionistic textures with some of these exotic kind of Spanish-sounding elements. It’s a really cool mix of those two,” Braun said.
Britten’s “Three Divertimenti” was written when Britten was still a student. It consists of three movements, including The March, Waltz and Burlesque.
“This piece is very quirky and lively and fun,” Pizzichemi said. “It’s Britten’s style in a microcosm.”
They have completed the initial editing of the recording, but still have more to do to finish the CD, including buying rights for the music, final mastering, writing the liner notes and designing the CD cover and booklet. Later they have to research distribution channels, such as iTunes and Amazon.com.
“There’s a lot that goes into it that we had never dealt with before,” Pizzichemi said. “It’s great that we’re still in school and still under the protection of the university.”
“The Chiara String Quartet need to brace themselves for an onslaught of questions about all these things,” Braun added.
They are hoping to be able to release the CD no later than January 2015 and are hoping to have some kind of CD release event or concert in Lincoln.
“We definitely want to do it here because this is where we recorded it,” Pizzichemi said.
“This is our community,” Braun said.
This final year of their doctoral work should be incredible and busy.
“We have so much we’re going to do, and it’s all going to be great,” Braun said.
They will have their last degree recital as a quartet in October, and are planning other performances in Lincoln and Omaha as well as high school and elementary school visits.
“We have a lot of ideas, and we’ll see how many of those come through for the Quartet,” Pizzichemi said. “We will try to do as much as we can.”
They are also preparing for what might come next.
“We are also preparing for where we may go next, which is another completely different set of issues that are exciting, but daunting,” Braun said. “Things are in the works, and more will be known in the future.”
“We don’t necessarily know ourselves [what is next], but it’s exciting. We do have ideas,” Pizzichemi added.
As they finish the work on their first CD, they are also ready to record again in the future.
“We are already all ready to do another one. We just had so much fun,” Pizzichemi said. “It was just a really great experience and definitely was spurred on by the university when we got the Hixson-Lied grant. We wouldn’t have been able to do it without it, so it was really great.”
“That was really the instigator behind everything else that happened was applying for that grant,” Braun said. “It was our first step, and I’m glad we took it.”