Bringing more music to more people

Not all universities can boast of free concerts by an internationally acclaimed string quartet in residence. Or interdisciplinary partnerships which bring professional musicians into classrooms to shed new light on subjects ranging from anthropology to physics.

But Emory can.

This year, Emory is celebrating the 40^th anniversary of William Ransom, a champion of music at the university, with a year of programming from the Emory Chamber Music Society of Atlanta featuring the Vega String Quartet and other musicians.

Ransom founded the Emory Chamber Music Society of Atlanta, the Southeast’s largest and most active chamber music group and serves as its artistic director. He recruited the Vega String Quartet, Atlanta’s first and only professional string quartet, as Emory’s quartet-in-residence, while ensuring that admission to Chamber Music Society performances remains free. For these innovations and others, Musical America magazine named him one of the world’s “30 musical innovators.”

Cellos in the cafeteria, violins in the gym

Just a few years earlier, in 1979, Robert W. Woodruff had gifted Emory $105 million, at the time the largest gift ever to a university, sparking a transformational period marked by a fresh sense of possibility. People began dreaming big, including Ransom. 

“What’s great about Emory,” he says, “is that our students are extremely talented musicians who love music. But we are not a music conservatory, and so they are going to be doctors and teachers and lawyers, rather than necessarily professional musicians.”

This gives the university a unique opportunity, he says. Rather than simply turning out musicians who knew they’d be musicians from an early age, faculty can cultivate new music lovers — students who will carry their appreciation for music throughout their lives. 

To bring music to more people across campus Ransom developed a chamber music program. Unlike a full orchestra, a group of string and woodwind players can take their talents just about anywhere, he notes. 

“We’ll take a chamber music group and play while people are having their meals,” Ransom says. “Or we’ll take a cellist to the dorms. Or we’ll go off to the gym. It’s great. I mean, people are doing their exercises and there’s a couple of violinists going in there playing some Handel and Halvorsen.” 

Ransom is a firm believer that there are two kinds of people in the world: those who love chamber music, and those who just haven’t heard it yet. The Emory Chamber Music Society, modeled on the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, “covers every nook and cranny of campus,” he says.

The society partners with instructors across the university to explore the connections between music and psychology, physics, philosophy and more — an interdisciplinary effort Ransom sees Emory as uniquely suited for. 

“It’s fascinating,” he says. “There really isn’t a single discipline that doesn’t have a relationship with music, and the faculty get that.” 

A performing arts center

With funding from donors, most notably Donna and Marvin Schwartz, Emory’s Schwartz Center for Performing Arts opened its doors in 2003. The interdisciplinary space for dance, theater and music features a theater lab, dance studio and the 825-seat Cherry Logan Emerson concert hall. 

“A lot of people seem to think that we built this impressive performing arts center, and the arts programs were born,” Ransom says. “The reality is that we built up a program that was so thriving that we had to be housed somewhere. We simply now have the correct facilities to do what we need to do.”

Today, the performing arts are one of the biggest draws bringing people from the community to campus.

The performance calendar kept growing, drawing musicians from all over Atlanta and soon, from all over the world, including Yo-Yo Ma, Richard Stoltzman and Dave Brubeck, among others.

Ransom realized one more thing was missing. The Chamber Music Society had been relying on local professional musicians to work with students, but many of them had impossibly busy schedules.  A healthy program needed dedicated professionals who could perform on campus on a Friday night, dream up interdisciplinary collaborations with the law school and work with music students.

Enter the Vega String Quartet. In 2006, Ransom secured the group as Emory’s string quartet in residence, at the same time establishing Atlanta’s first professional string quartet. Quickly, the internationally celebrated group became an integral part of the city’s cultural landscape, marking a pinnacle of Ransom’s career and his goal to expand access to classical music. “It really fulfills all the dreams I’ve had to make this program work,” Ransom says.

Thinking ahead

Looking forward, William Ransom hopes that the chamber music program will last for at least another 40 years.

It’s something he thinks about a lot, as the Emory Chamber Music Society is supported by private contributions. Thankfully, the Vega Quartet residency is now funded in perpetuity due to a matching grant from the Abraham J. and Phyllis Katz Foundation, ensuring that the university will have a quartet-in-residence forever.

“My major focus now is making sure the Chamber Music Society continues after I leave,” he says. “It matters because I firmly believe that great music is as close to anything that God has made that happens to be channeled through humans. It does something very important for the soul.”

Medical research and health care are worthy, noble endeavors, he adds. “They can mean the difference between death and life itself. But we also need a reason to live. And for many of us, music gives us that.”