Telegraph Quartet Ralston White Chamber Retreat

As the Quartet-in-Residence at SFCM, the Telegraph Quartet has hosted a winter term chamber music retreat for two seasons, 2020 and then revived again in 2023 at the palatial Ralston White Retreat in Mill Valley north of San Francisco.  Over the course of five days, the Quartet worked with students from the SFCM chamber music class, giving coachings, masterclasses, round-table discussions, sight-reading parties and other recreational activities that culminated in a final concert where four chamber groups performed multiple movements or complete works of chamber music. 

The TeleLab Series gives our audience the time and space to deepen their experience of our music, in particular works that are very rich and complex.  By focusing on either a single movement or an entire quartet, our goal is to open a window into what makes that piece tick. To do this, we use visual aids via projection to excerpt important themes from the work and first play them out of context to help familiarize our audience with their true nature. We then gradually add them back into their musical environment, and then explore the journey and evolution of these themes as they make their way through the movement or entire work.  After intermission, we play the piece in its entirety. Whether an audience member is hearing the piece for the first or hundredth time, they’ll have an experience that deepens their relationship to this music we love.

Check out an example of how this works in one of our Online TeleLabs.

ChamberFEAST!

In the Fall of 2020, during the height of the Pandemic, the Telegraph Quartet traveled to one of the only places in the world that was allowing safe, live concerts and chamber coachings: Taiwan.  With the financial help of SFCM, the Quartet embarked on a two-week-long chamber music intensive with 13 Taiwanese SFCM students and other universities who were otherwise only enrolled online, that provided live chamber music coaching with members of the Telegraph Quartet actually embedded in their chamber groups.  We coached, played and ultimately performed beside these students in a final performance and the students received the equivalent credit hours of a semester of chamber music at SFCM, condensed into those two weeks.  During this time Telegraph Quartet also collaborated with faculty of Taiwan Normal University and Taiwan National University of the Arts, performing two full live concerts at the Eslite Concert Hall in Taipei, Taiwan.