Getting to Know You: Conversations with the Yings

Over the coming weeks we will share some recent conversations with David Ying and Phillip Ying as they embark on their debut season as Artistic Directors of the Festival. Below is the first in a series of short interviews. Here they discuss where they came from and what the season’s theme, The Art of Friendship, means to them.

The Importance of Being an Earnest Mentor

The Ying Quartet, originally three brothers and their sister, burst onto the Chamber Music scene in 1992 and has never looked back. As the Bowdoin International Music Festival launches its 51^st season, two of the four, David, the cellist, and Phillip, the violist, are stepping into iconic shoes that most would deem overwhelmingly challenging. As the new artistic co-directors of the Bowdoin Festival, where they have been quartet-in-residence for the past 11 years, they will be honoring past traditions while focusing on the importance of mentoring within the local and global community.

To better acquaint our audiences with David and Phillip, we sat down with them this spring. If you want to get to know them even better, take advantage of multiple opportunities during the Festival this season to hear them perform in string quartets, trios, octets, small orchestral works, solos, husband/wife duos, and teaching masterclasses. Come hear them, meet them, and watch and listen how they practice what they believe with intensity and earnestness.

BIMF: In a family consisting of five children whose parents were not musicians, how did four of those children end up working together as the now-famous Ying Quartet?

David: We all enjoyed music from a relatively young age, but we weren’t prodigies and started later than most kids. It was important to our parents that we be well-rounded, and music was part of the equation in that we were expected to study some instrument if only to learn an appreciation of it and to balance out our other areas of study and socialization. Interestingly enough, even though we took piano lessons, nobody wanted to pursue piano. I didn’t have the natural ability to move my fingers over a keyboard with enough agility, but for whatever reason, the cello just seemed to fit and I enjoyed how it felt and the sounds it could make.

We all went to college to pursue our own paths. Phillip majored in Economics at Harvard but he also loved music and thought he’d like to develop his appreciation for it at Eastman, where I was studying. Eventually, four of us were there together; I was in graduate school when Janet was just entering Eastman as a freshman undergrad. The Cleveland Quartet was in residence then, and they put the puzzle together after teaching and mentoring all of us. That was key. They were not only wonderful teachers and performers, but they had an uncanny ability to mentor their students and we were lucky beneficiaries. They left a life-long imprint on each of us and made us realize, especially now that we are here at Bowdoin, how important mentorship is in the lives of all our students.

This gorgeous campus is such a nurturing environment, with all of Brunswick’s rich cultural and environmental perks wrapped around us. It’s really key to what sets the Festival apart from other summer music festivals. Students don’t just come here, take a few lessons, play in a few concerts and go home. Their teachers are all superb mentors and are willing to share not only their musical knowledge and expertise but to also teach them how to listen to other instruments, to interact with those who play them, to experiment with different techniques, and expand their thought process so that they are open to new ideas. They dine with them, make music with them, coach their chamber ensembles, and stay in touch after they disperse at the end of the season.

Phillip: Family is also very important to us, and mentoring mimics what we do as parents. The Festival becomes a family and it comes full circle.

BIMF: There’s been a lot written about your experience in Jessup, Iowa. Tell us about that and how it influenced you as individuals and as a string quartet. How did the experience tie into the whole mentoring thing?

David: It all began in 1992 when we received a two-year grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to promote chamber music in rural Iowa. Iowa wasn’t all that far from Winnetka, Illinois where we grew up, but Jessup is really rural – a little town of 2,000 folks out in the middle of the corn fields, so to speak. We weren’t sure what we were getting into, but it was a fantastic eye-opener. We discovered how introducing classical music to and performing for people who have had very little exposure to this genre can affect an entire community.

Phillip: How does context make a difference in how you play or where you play? We had a front-row seat watching how music became relevant to a community. When we came to Bowdoin 11 years ago, it helped inform us about how the Festival has a place in Brunswick on the college campus.

David: Between September and May of our first year we played 150 concerts in Jessup and other nearby towns, and people really listened. No matter who asked us to play, we went and we played, whether for four people in someone’s home or for 400 in the high school gym. We always played as well as possible – and at that point we were still growing used to being an independent string quartet working out our own technique, learning how to be collegial siblings who had to live and work together every day. It gave us a chance to be who we are, to mentor ourselves and to mentor others.

I taught a 73-year-old lady how to play the cello; she had never held a string instrument in her hands before that. During that first summer, the folks in Jessup started their own arts fair for the first time, providing a venue for people who wanted to demonstrate whatever craft or talent they cared to share. So we came out of there realizing that making music was more about community and connecting with people; it gave us a much bigger vision of what a musician can do than just musical performances.

Our experience showed us how we can always look for ways to collaborate with other artists and how music can fit into the fabric of life. What we brought to Jessup opened doors not only for the townsfolk but also for us. The experience really formed us and imprinted the idea of mentoring within a community, which could encompass anything from a small chamber group to a full orchestra to an entire festival or teaching environment.

BIMF: When you first arrived at Bowdoin as quartet-in residence, were you able to put to use what you’d learned in Jessup? And how has that translated to what’s going on today?

David: Lewis Kaplan knew us through Janet, who had been a student here at the Festival. He had a vision that he wanted to bring more centrality to the Festival by having a resident ensemble that could bring more focus to chamber music. Lewis very kindly asked us if we’d be interested. We’ve been here ever since. String quartets are part of the Festival’s DNA, and Lewis established that.

Phillip: In our teaching we try to focus on more than just expertise in playing music. A truly good musician has to get to the core of the composer who wrote the piece: what was going on in the composer’s life, what he was trying to say/express. And then the musician has to learn to hear what his or her colleagues are playing, interweaving a colleague’s music with his or her own, so that, together, they create a beautiful picture. So that’s where mentoring comes in again. We mentor the students we teach, as do all our faculty, and the students, especially the Kaplan Fellows, can mentor the younger, less experienced ones.

Last year the Festival introduced the Monday night Beethoven string quartets, and we’re following Lewis’s suggestion that we keep that series focused on string quartets. Variety will always be present, but string quartets are an important pillar in chamber music. The Festival’s Community Concerts mimic the Jessup experience in many ways, in that the students fan out up and down the midcoast area to play in all sorts of interesting venues, taking music to places where one doesn’t ordinarily find it. They can’t do that without good mentoring from their coaches, their colleagues, and the more experienced Kaplan Fellows. There’s that full circle again.