Novel Rhythms: Finding a Common Pulse in Music for String Quartet + One

I spoke with Camden Shaw, cellist of the Dover Quartet, ahead of the Sonic Spectrum concert on April 17, 2025, in which the quartet joins forces with clarinetist Romie de Guise-Langlois, harpist Bridget Kibbey, and percussionist Ian David Rosenbaum. 

Nicky Swett: All of the pieces on the upcoming Sonic Spectrum concert are for “string quartet + one” instrumentations, works where a stray artist joins a pre-existing quartet formation. We tend to think of the string quartet as a cohesive unit: you are four individuals, but you’re also one instrument in a certain sense. When you have a single other player joining the mix, how does it change the way in which you interact with your colleagues? 

Camden Shaw: I like to think of people as magic eight balls—that different circumstances bring to light novel reactions, even from someone you know really well. That happens with these collaborations. When the dynamic is new and different, and when the music is really outside our normal comfort zone, which is the case for a few of these pieces in a healthy way, it really does freshen things up. You get surprising interactions even among these very familiar faces. 

Of course, it’s always an opportunity to learn something new about the way other musicians feel rhythm. I love experiencing the beat that other people have. Groups develop a strong sense of pulse that’s unique, and having someone else in that and dancing around with that is one of my favorite things in a plus-one circumstance. 

NS: Are there marked differences between adding, say, another string player or adding a piano or adding a wind instrument in terms of how interactions between the newcomer and the quartet develop? 

CS: You know that expression “when all you have is a hammer, all the world's a nail”? There's that effect with string players: when you’re a string player, everything looks like a melody. And when you play with a percussionist, everything’s a rhythm. Piano is a balance between those two ideologies. Every instrument group has their viewpoint on the world and on the way music works. Playing with a string player, there’s so much empathy, immediate understanding, and probably a lot of similar friends and colleagues. But I really love playing with non-bowed string instruments, because there’s that perspective shift that adds a richness to what’s going on in the ensemble.  

NS: The clarinet and string quartet combination is quite a common one. The clarinet usually doesn’t use vibrato in classical repertoire. Does that create complexities when blending with a string quartet?  

CS: We do Brahms and Mozart clarinet quintets often, so that is a familiar medium. With clarinet, we’re back to the world of extreme line. I don’t particularly feel the urge to play non-vibrato with the clarinet when it is a duet texture. I just enjoy the two different colors. We’ve actually played with a few clarinetists who use vibrato very well and rampantly! That was more shocking to me just because I’m not used to it. I quite like the blend of non-vibrato and vibrato. 

NS: Have you played much music for string quartet and harp? 

CS: We did a cool project with Bridget Kibbey in the past. That was a lot of Bach. I’m excited to do some other stuff with her on this concert. She’s an incredibly inspiring, warm collaborator, and I love the way the harp works in a quartet. It’s a very powerful instrument, at least the way that she plays it, and it holds up really strongly.  

NS: What are some other collaborations your group has had with single artists that are memorable? 

CS: I’d say one interesting caveat to what I said earlier about string players is Edgar Meyer, who is a double bass player, but his musical worldview is so rhythmic. Some of the people that he’s worked with a lot are very focused on pulse, and the way that he plays the bass is highly rhythmic. He’s one of those musicians who strikes a compromise between line and time that’s really fascinating. 

One of the collaborations that stands out the most to me is playing with Ian David Rosenbaum. We’ve done projects with him throughout the years and recorded the whole of Andy Akiho’s LIgNEouS Suite for Marimba and String Quartet, which is a really tough piece of music. It’s one of those things where looking back on it, you wonder how you did that project! Ian is not only a wonderful human being, just so patient and warm and energetic, but he blows my mind with his ability on the marimba and the way he thinks about rhythm and space. Andy Akiho’s music stretches us a lot. It’s really ambitious in a good way. Andy expects a lot of himself, he pushes himself really hard, and there’s a lot of thought that goes into his music. Ian has this incredible gift that he can actually do anything that Andy and his crazy imagination sets out to do. Ian will calmly say “yeah, I can do that,” and then he has the entire thing memorized. He’s one of the most influential collaborators we’ve had, and so I'm really excited we get to do something with him again on this program. 

NS: Are there things that are particularly challenging about playing with percussion?  

CS: They expose the naivety of our rhythm. It’s not even necessarily that we have bad rhythm, although it can be a lot better! But I notice with a great percussionist like Ian, if you ask him how he is feeling a complicated rhythm, he’s not feeling it only one way. Say you have a complex group of sevens and elevens. A great percussionist is feeling it at least two ways at the same time because any one perspective has its leanings and temptations. He’ll answer with something like, “For this group of seven, I’m doing a four-plus-three on my right side, but I’m feeling three-plus-four on the left,” so it has this solid point in the middle. That is tough for us because we don’t grow up strengthening those ways of thinking and feeling rhythm as much as percussionists do. It’s very humbling and exciting. 

Cellist, writer, and music researcher Nicky Swett is a PhD Candidate and Gates Scholar at the University of Cambridge. He is a program annotator and editorial contributor for many concert presenters, including Carnegie Hall, the New York Philharmonic, the Civic Orchestra of Chicago, the BBC, Music@Menlo, and the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center.