Co-Op High School | Education & Youth | Music | Musicians | Yale Schwarzman Center
Lucy Gellman Photos.
The notes came fast and furious, one on top of the other. In one world, four string instruments were neck-and-neck with each other, racing toward a resolution with wild abandon. Violin emerged, undulating, and cello pulsed sharply beneath it. Viola rose, an oncoming wave, and sprinted so fast it seemed there was no room for breath.
As the sound wove over the seats and up to the high ceilings, it swelled and bulged, its contours dizzying in the light. In the third row, violinist Jaden Cuapio watched, spellbound, a question forming on the tip of her tongue.
That sound—the last movement of Phillip Glass’ take on Dracula—filled Cooperative Arts & Humanities High School on last week, as Brooklyn Rider performed in the school’s first-floor auditorium. As string and band students found their seats, the quartet transformed the school into an intimate performance venue, weaving time for questions and music knowledge into excerpts of their work.
In that time, it became a reminder of the powerful choice to play music—and the gift it can be to the world—when teachers, parents, and peers have taken a person as far as they can go, and the rest is up to them.
Junior Jasmine King and Senior Jaden Cuapio.
The quartet comprises Johnny Gandelsman and Colin Jacobsen on violin, Nicholas Cords on viola and Michael Nicolas on cello. The four to Co-Op came courtesy of the Yale Schwarzman Center, where they launched their 20th anniversary season with three concerts last week. The concerts revisited their interpretations of the composer Philip Glass, with a sense of drama and panache that kicked Glass’ minimalist label to the curb.
“The medium of the string quartet is a place for endless discovery and learning,” Gandelsman said, a small cup of coffee resting at his feet like an offering. “We end up learning so much from these experiences.”
That was evident as the quartet began, weaving selections from their concert “Philip Glass: A String Quartet Retrospective” into questions from students and deep reflections from the musicians themselves. As dozens of eyes looked eagerly toward the stage, musicians launched into a riff on Glass’ 1995 “Melodies for Saxophone,” their bodies leaning in towards each other.
A burst of sound hit the air, musicians moving in unison. Their knees bent. Backs arched and relaxed; shoulders tilted from side to side. One instrument would propose a shrill, economical phrase and the others would follow, sound looping around until suddenly it was circling itself in a careful, measured dance.
The strings wound upwards, dizzying and precise in their speed. Already, the sound had been a sharp, stark thing that kept the audience on its toes; now it seemed to hurdle forward through space. Arranged atop a small red rug on the stage, musicians showed no sign of stopping.
“What did you hear?” asked Cords, who is also an educator at the New England Conservatory, when they had finished.
In the front row, junior Jasmine King chewed on the question, mulling it over. A student several rows back raised his hand before she could get an answer in. “Whole-tone scale?” he asked.
Another asked for the time signature, which seemed to stop and start and stop again with a heart-shuddering precision.
“It’s a good way to wake up,” Gandelsman said with a wry smile. He motioned to the cup of coffee at his feet, noting that it was his second of the morning. A few students in the audience, still trying to shake off the last dregs of sleep, laughed.
Back onstage, the four—who have played together for 20 years, but each played on their own for much longer—moved into selections from Tod Browning’s 1931 Dracula, which opened as a silent film starring Bela Lugosi in the early 20th century. Decades later, Glass scored it for the Kronos Quartet in 1999.
Browning never lived to see the 1931 film set to music; he died in 1962. Of some 26 tracks, Cords introduced three, starting with the haunting, slow-burning “Women In White.” The title is based on Dracula’s victim Lucy Weston (who becomes a vampire, because of course she does), then played by a young Frances Dade. In the film, Weston-as-vampire dresses in white, standing close to a public park where she lures children close and then bites them to take their blood.
As they ushered in the number—and spooky season—the strings seemed to breathe more slowly, laboriously, plotting their first move. Over whining, simmering viola, a thread of violin dipped in and out, meditative. They circled each other, cello resonant and humming beneath them. It began to vibrate, then backed away for just a moment.
Then, as if the titular women in white had found a break in the action, violin stepped forward and fell into a kind of trance. Viola took note, mellowing out. Strings wound upward together, in a singsong kind of lockstep with each other. Under it, Nicolas’ cello ebbed and flowed, playing scales that seemed to rock back and forth like a see-saw.
If there was something like resolution—a quiet, certain calm that came over the auditorium—it didn’t last. As they jumped to the penultimate track, the sound bubbled at a slow build, growing until it soared over the seats and traveled toward an empty balcony. By the time the four had reached “The End if Dracula,” it had reached the high ceiling and somehow still seemed to swell, the rising sound ferocious
In the main seats, strings teacher Henry Lugo watched, entranced. Back towards the front, Cuapio nearly forgot to exhale. Only when the quartet finished, bows suspended in the air, did the room burst into applause, breath suddenly easy again. In the third row, Cuapio’s hand was one of the first to go up.
“Did you guys have to overcome obstacles” in personal and professional work, she asked amidst a bevy of questions that included practice schedules to how long the four have played together to how they find motivation even after years of playing classical music (“At a certain point along the way—and it’s sooner than you think—you have to rely on yourself,” Cords said at one point).
On stage, all four exchanged a few smiles and knowing glances. Gandelsman, who just last month received a 2024 MacArthur Fellowship, began to talk, the violin still placed in his hand. Cuapio—as well as Lugo, band teacher Pat Smith and three dozen of her peers—hung onto every word.
Growing up in a family of musicians in Moscow and then Israel, playing initially seemed like it was just in him. “I didn’t really have a choice in the matter” as a child, he said with a little, light laugh at the edge of his voice. After high school, Gandelsman attended the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, he moved to New York City, and stopped playing professionally. For years, he pursued other work, only pulling out the violin if it was playing with friends. Slowly, that musical family helped him find his way back to playing full-time.
“I found a way to find joy in playing,” he said. “I felt like I was part of a community.” He took a beat. “I think we face doubt all the time. It’s just a matter of shifting perspective.”
Nicolas, who grew up in Winnipeg, Canada and now lives in New York, added that he had a similar experience. As a kid, it was his parents who kept him playing music. But when he got to The Juilliard School in New York City, “I realized how much I wanted to be part of this community,” he said. He saw the work that his classmates put into their artistic pursuits, and upped his game.
Strings teacher Henry Lugo.
Back in the third row, Cuapio held the advice close. Four years ago, she picked up the violin when she started her freshman year at Co-Op, her third instrument after studying the clarinet and saxophone in middle school. Now “the more I practice,” the more she realizes how closely music is tied to her mental health. It helps her stay calm, including from siblings and a busy home life.
“It was such a great opportunity to hear them and to see them,” she added of Brooklyn Rider.
Classmate Jasmine King, a junior at the school and viola student with Lugo, agreed. Growing up in New Haven, she began viola lessons with the nonprofit Music Haven 11 years ago, after her grandfather spotted a flier for the program and encouraged her to sign up.
In over a decade of playing and practicing, she said, she’s had to find her own joy in the music to keep going. From the stage, Gandelsman’s reply resonated with her.
“I’ve been through the ‘Hey, I don’t want to do this anymore,’” she said. “It’s my love for the music” that keeps her going. As she’s gotten older, King added, she’s realized what a de-stressor and emotional release playing music can be.
“It helps me work out stress,” she said. “That’s why I be playing Vivaldi. And this—it was amazing!"