Tesla Quartet will return to Morris Museum for seventh appearance in annual Back Deck series

TITILAYO AYANGADE

The Tesla Quartet (from left, Michelle Lie, Ross Snyder, Austin Fisher and Edwin Kaplan).

The Morris Museum’s annual Lot of Strings Back Deck Concert Series launched in 2020 as a way to perform live music in an open space with social distancing in mind, and has grown over the years. Performances take place on the museum’s elevated parking deck overlooking Morris Township’s stately greenery and long sunsets.

The Tesla Quartet has been a frequent participant. Its appearance there, Aug. 23, will be its seventh in the series’ six years, though its first since 2022.

“It’s such an inviting and flexible environment, and the audience is very warm and welcoming,” says violinist Michelle Lie, who forms the group with violinist Ross Snyder, violist Edwin Kaplan and cellist Austin Fisher. “Having to play in a lot of different places, you get a unique cultural experience with the different crowds, and that’s a very special thing about the Morris Museum. So we’re looking forward to breathing with our audiences again.”

The diverse program of string quartet repertoire will include Joseph Haydn’s “The Joke Quartet,” Grażyna Bacewicz’s First String Quartet and Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel’s String Quartet. The music demands a unified ensemble of four minds communicating as one, and these players are up to caliber.

The group will play up the festival’s dressed-down, lighthearted tone by opening with Haydn’s String Quartet in E flat major, Op. 33 No. 2, nicknamed “The Joke Quartet,” from his set of six string quartets (1781). The Austrian composer of the Classical period was well known for his cheerfulness and good humor. Innovation, too. He is credited with developing the string quartet genre, along with the symphony and the scherzo, into their mature forms.

“With Haydn’s set of Opus 33 quartets, he introduced the scherzo,” Snyder says. “He took what people understood to be standard and pulled the rug out from under them. With the minuet, which was a traditional dance form … being the musical prankster that he was, he took the humor to the next level. It still follows the minuet form, but maybe the tempo is faster; or maybe he uses irregular phrase structures. If you tried to dance to it, you would end up on the wrong foot or finish your dance steps with two more bars of music still to go.”

JACK GRASSA

The Tesla Quartet, at The Morris Museum’s Back Deck series in 2021.

Haydn was a friend and mentor of Mozart and a teacher of Beethoven; both enjoyed making their own little Haydnesque musical jokes. They would set up endings with unbalanced phrases that somehow felt as if a beat or measure of music was missing, so the listener was left up in the air.

“With this particular scherzo of this quartet, the main body of the movement isn’t really all that funny: it’s boisterous but he’s not really pulling any pranks,” Snyder says. “Then you get to the trio section, and he asks the first violin to play in a particular way that you might consider gaudy or unseemly for a courtly dance. So in a way, he’s having fun with the seriousness of the court.”

The group has played the piece often over the last year or so. “It’s a lot of fun,” Snyder says. “Listeners will have to come to the concert to get the punchline.”

The program’s centerpiece will be Bacewicz’s String Quartet No. 1. The modern Polish composer isn’t well known and the group is on a mission to remedy that. They have been working through her set of seven string quartets and play them frequently.

“It’s been great over the last couple years to take these works to places and be the first performance of this music,” Snyder says. “And not even of just her quartets, but the first time in some of these places where anybody has heard anything by her. It’s exciting to be that initiator and we hope people will fall in love with her music like we have.”

Bacewicz dedicated her career to bringing 20th century Polish classical music into the mainstream. Her compositions combine strains of modernism with Polish folk songs.

Compared to her later string quartets, the first one, from 1938, is a bit more harmonically lush and melodic. By the time she wrote her final quartet in 1965, her style had evolved as more experimental and dissonant.

The Tesla Quartet (from left, Ross Snyder, Edwin Kaplan, Austin Fisher and Michelle Lie).

“She was trying to find her groundings with the First Quartet,” says Lie. “The music is very cinematic. It is quite accessible despite some dissonance you will hear, but she was a very profound violinist herself, so I find it to be a very enjoyable experience in the way it fits in the hand very nicely.”

The group was first introduced to her music in 2019 after being invited to play her Fourth and Seventh Quartets at the Bard Music West Festival in San Francisco. As they started to prepare and rehearse the music, Snyder was struck at how familiar it sounded, even though the works themselves were obscure. He was sure he had heard something similar before.

“A number of years ago, I had bought a CD that happened to feature her Fourth Quartet,” he says. “I probably bought it because it had some other piece of music that I was looking for. So it turns out I was already familiar with the music — I just didn’t know it.”

The group is highly attuned to using its platform to amplify underrepresented voices. Both the Bacewicz and Hensel selection aim in that direction.

Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel’s more famous brother Felix Mendelssohn was such a musical legend that it would be hard for anyone to compete with him, but she was never given the chance. “She was given all the opportunities as a child to learn music but wasn’t afforded the opportunities to pursue it professionally, or to the extent that Felix was,” Snyder says.

Hensel had a complex relationship with her brother. She would often take the themes from his music and develop them with more structural and tonal freedom. Stylistically, their ideas were similar, and Felix would often pass off her compositions as his own, even publishing some under his own name.

Fanny was only allowed to showcase her talents at concerts organized in the family home. She had strong ambitions to publish her music, but Felix was not an ally. The Mendelssohn literature tells us that she was acutely aware of the disparity.

“After writing this amazing string quartet (1834), which is the only quartet she ever wrote, she wrote a long letter saying how discouraged she was,” Lie says. “She was having a really hard time sticking with one thematic idea and taking the criticisms of her brother, which was very important to her. She said she should just stick with writing Lieder (German art song).

“That’s really sad because she could have written so many more string quartets. She only lived to be 41 and said on her deathbed she regretted that.”

The Tesla Quartet (from left, Ross Snyder, Michelle Lie, Edwin Kaplan and Austin Fisher).

Lie, who will play second violin in the work, has noticed some instances in the music that sound the same as Felix’s String Quartet, Op. 13. “Right away it captures my ears, and I think, ‘Wait a minute, I know this piece!’ I think it really shows in her music that they had a really close brother-sister relationship, both musically and personally.”

Hensel’s music wasn’t discovered until the late 20th century, and she has finally been reassessed as a gifted composer in her own right. This piece in particular shows it. “I find myself humming bits of it throughout the day, absentmindedly, and I think that’s the hallmark of a good piece: It stays with you,” Snyder says.

Snyder is the only remaining original member of The Tesla Quartet. The co-founders were all graduate students at The Juilliard School when they formed it, in 2008.

As with most modern American string quartets, the group is democratic in nature, which means there is no concertmaster.

“The Quartet is a tiny little society and also very tight-knit group of people, kind of like family members,” Lie says. “The four of us all have our individual contribution to the Quartet’s operations and projects.”

Lie, who came aboard in 2011, handles logistics and scheduling, including securing venues for rehearsals and concerts. Snyder wears many different hats, covering everything from communications to accounting.

Before the quartet came into existence, the two happened to be students at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston at the same time. “I was in the middle of my undergrad degree and Michelle was doing a master’s degree,” Snyder says. “Our academic circles didn’t overlap that much and we didn’t know each other that well, which is ironic because we lived at opposite ends of the same block.”

Their musical introduction came in 2007 at the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival in Connecticut. “When it came time to audition violinists (for The Tesla Quartet), she was on the list of people that we had known and knew their playing, and knew they loved chamber music,” Snyder says.

Kaplan joined in 2013. He is a native New Yorker and lived for a number of years in New Jersey as a child. He is the member who makes connections with the group’s communities, donors and fans.

Fisher, a member since 2023, handles the quartet’s social media.

Outside of the group, they are all busy professional musicians and active soloists. Their long-term goals are to continue to explore new repertoire, premiere new works, perform in new communities and collaborate with new artists.

The Tesla Quartet will bring the same program that they will perform at The Morris Museum to the Ringwood Friends of Music, Sept. 6. “We always look forward to these concerts in towns where we haven’t been before, because it’s exciting to make a connection with a new audience and share music that might be new to them,” Snyder says.

Even when playing familiar pieces, they aim to bring out new ideas. “If we’re rehearsing a piece that we’ve played 100 times, we just make sure things are together the way they need to be, and then leave some room to try something that we haven’t done before,” says Snyder.

The Tesla Quartet will perform on the Back Deck at The Morris Museum in Morris Township, Aug. 23 at 7:30 p.m. Patrons are encouraged to come early and bring their own chairs and refreshments. Visit morrismuseuum.org.

They also will perform in the Ringwood Friends of Music series at the Community Presbyterian Church in Ringwood, Sept. 6 at 7 p.m. Visit ringwoodfriendsofmusic.org.

For more on The Tesla Quartet, visit teslaquartet.com.

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