Name: Mivos Quartet
Members: Olivia De Prato (violin), Maya Bennardo (violin), Victor Lowrie Tafoya (viola), Tyler J. Borden (cello)
Interviewees: Victor Lowrie, Tyler J. Borden
Nationalities: Austro-Italian (Olivia), American-Italian (Maya), American, (Victor, Tyler)
Current release: The Mivos Quartet's Steve Reich - The String Quartets is out via Deutsche Grmmophon.

If you enjoyed this interview with Mivos Quartet and would like to stay up to date with their music, releases, and tour dates, visit their official website. The ensemble is also on Instagram, Facebook, and twitter.

For more thoughts, read our Maya Bennardo interview or our conversations with some of thee individual members' collaborators:

[Read our Dai Fujikura interview]
[Read our David Lang interview]



When did you first start getting interested in musical interpretation?  

(Victor) Mivos was founded in 2008 in New York. Myself and the other founding members were part of the first class of the Masters in Contemporary Music program at the Manhattan School of Music, so we were already pre-selected to be focused on new music.

From our very first concert that year, coming together as a chamber ensemble to make collective interpretations of new works became an instant obsession.

Which artists, approaches, albums or performances captured your imagination in the beginning when it comes to the art of interpretation?

(Victor) We had the Vivaldi Four Seasons with Nigel Kennedy and the English Chamber Orchestra in our CD collection growing up. That stood out to me as unusual and exciting. In a rare bout of sickness as a teenager I listened to that record for an entire day for comfort.



I also heard Nokuthula Ngwenyama perform the Bartok Viola Concerto live, and that really blew me away.

What, would you say, are the key ideas behind your approach to interpretation? Do you see yourself as part of a tradition or historic lineage?

(Victor) I don’t think it’s possible for any art to be made completely outside of some kind of tradition or lineage. Even if the milieu of a certain composer is to completely reject their inherited musical context, that is still a reaction to wherever they come from or happen to be born into. The string quartet has an over 270 year tradition.

That being said, Mivos is a quartet dedicated to new works and recent additions to the repertoire, with a particular focus on collaborations with living composers. Part of the joy inherent in interpreting new music is the sense of exploration and freedom that comes with learning new pieces, new compositional styles and new performance techniques. All of our “classical” training is useful toward creating interpretations, yet we are constantly pushing our own boundaries to learn new ways of approaching pieces, our ensemble capabilities, and the possibilities in our respective instruments.

I would say it is essential to recognize and familiarize yourself with the artistic traditions native to you, and to also feel free to explore and change and grow as an artist. It’s a process that never ends, with each person and each ensemble riding that artistic wave and making their own unique contributions.

Could you describe your approach to interpretation on the basis of a piece, live performance or album that's particularly dear to you, please?

(Victor) An early, exciting experience for Mivos was to get to work with Helmut Lachenmann on his 2nd & 3rd string quartets. Both of those works are unquestionably iconic new masterpieces for the string quartet repertoire.



In preparation for a performance of the 2nd, we went to his Italian study and spent a weekend rehearsing with him. He is a kind, funny, intelligent man, and also very exacting and specific, so we worked very hard on every single detail of this intricate piece. Not only was it great fun and a lot of work, but we had enough time to also hang out, eat together, listen to a few stories, and just get to know each other.

Having the sense of Lachenmann as a person helped us, helped me at least, tackle this very challenging piece with more clarity. Writing about this experience now makes me want to perform the piece again!

What was your own learning curve / creative development like when it comes to interpretation - what were challenges and breakthroughs?

(Victor) I’d say one of the main learning curves that must be negotiated for any new music performer is learning how to adjust the speed at which you can / should learn new pieces. The demands of festivals, commissions, premieres, repertoire additions to programs, etc., mean that you must be able to learn new things quickly and efficiently. You’ll almost never have “enough” rehearsal time, so you need to figure out how to rehearse, individually and as an ensemble, in the most efficient ways.

In the context of the quartet, that involves decisions on internal conducting, who gives cues, tempo memorization, meter groupings and the like. That leads directly to rhythm. Rhythm is the most fundamental aspect I would say, and the traditional classical conservatory training does little to equip you for that reality. All of the performing arts have the element of time, of rhythm, as their most fundamental organizing structure, and every performer needs to master this at the micro and macro level in order to have the foundation for expressive freedom.

To put it very practically for musicians: take all of the musicianship concepts and courses seriously!

In many cases, the score will be the first and foremost resource for an interpretation. Can you explain about how “reading” a score works for you?

(Victor) For several years now, Mivos has been a score-reading quartet, meaning we almost always are all reading from the score on tablets, using wireless foot pedals to turn pages. So in a very real sense we read from the score most of the time. Apart from the efficiency this affords us in terms of saving time marking up individual parts with cues and the like, it also enables us to combine score pracitce and individual part practice together.

But I think another sense of the question is whether the piece of paper, be it physical or digital, is always the final word regarding interpretation. I can say that there is sometimes disagreement within the quartet, and certainly different tendencies amongst the four of us, about this issues, which is a good thing. My own take is that no, the score of a piece is always, at best, a very detailed blueprint for what will happen when musicians actually perform a piece live.

That being said, I would strongly admonish all emerging composers to spend 90% of their time making their score exactly what they want them to be - as specific or open or idiosyncratic, depending on what musical result you want. The score should tell the musicians what you want to hear, whatever that is, in the clearest possible way.

One of the key phrases often used with regards to interpretation are the “composer's intentions”. What is your own perspective on this topic and its relevance for your own interpretations?

Mivos is fortunate in that we usually get to collaborate with composers directly and ask the composers as many questions we might have about their intentions. Sometimes those are very straightforward and map directly onto what we see on the page. Other times, through the process of rehearsal, things change and the initial score becomes just a rough draft of the “final” product.

Scholarship in Western Classical music reveals that many composers were also performers, improvisors, writers, etc. There is a resurgence of that in modern times, many composers also having a performance outlet or even parallel career, which I couldn’t be more supportive of!

It’s so important to actually make music, live, for other people, to continue to connect with the visceral act of performance in order to make what ends up written on the page vital and instructive for the interpreter.

When you have the score in front of you, what's your take on taking things literally, correcting possible mistakes, taking into account historical aspects etc?

(T.J.) We use our best judgment. There are certainly idiosyncrasies of notation that need to be identified and considered within the sound world of each piece. Additionally, it’s important to consider the use of notation within its proper context - both with respect to how the work is situated within history and how it’s situated within the composer’s oeuvre.

What role does improvisation play for your interpretations?

This changes considerably depending on the needs of the piece. Spontaneity is always important for engaging music-making in live settings. In a sense, even if you’ve practiced something diligently, you need to be fully present - performing on ‘auto-pilot’ should never be the goal of preparation.

I have a robust improvisational practice, and I tend towards a more purist point of view. Often, even if large swaths of material are left up to the performer, I try to make my decisions within the context of the piece, as opposed to the context given by my personal taste. Within music that is more dependent on improvisation, important overarching aspects such as form or sonic development are often decided in the moment, without prior discussion or thought.

With the Reich quartets, the degree of precision required to render them properly doesn’t leave much room for fanciful elaboration.

Interpretations can be wildly different live compared to the studio. What is this like for you?

Largely, this is a natural consequence of the differences inherent in studio and live settings. The studio offers possibilities that aren’t realistic or, sometimes, even feasible in live performance. This quality should be leaned into! I think a stark recognition of these differences and what they enable or hinder will only allow the musician to make better decisions and a maximize the potential of each setting.

However, because of the layered, pre-recorded string quartet parts, the gap between these two contexts is made considerably smaller. Reich’s writing does account for the fact that the first quartet will be live - thus, in the lead quartet parts, the material changes more and often the melody or point of aural focus is featured.

But when so much of the musical material is pre-recorded, we are pushed to perform with the kind of precision that is necessary for recordings, which limits the variation in interpretation between live and studio interpretations.

With regards to the studio situation, what role do sound, editing possibilities and other production factors play for your interpretation?

These are quite important to identify and address because they will inform large decisions about how you structure your time in the studio. In the Reich quartets, this is especially important. Each piece requires recording multiple different string quartets and layering them.

Strategic planning and quick editing by our engineer and producer Mike Tierney were essential for shaping the architectonics of each piece and moving through the recording process at a reasonable pace.

Artists can return to a work several times throughout the course of their career, with different results. Tell me about a work where this has been the case for you, please.

(T.J.) Elliott Carter’s ‘Cello Sonata’ was a formative work for me early on in my exploration of contemporary concert music. I think it continues to be a very exciting work of music and one of the pinnacle examples of mid-century American modernism.

Part of the intrigue of interpretations is that the process is usually endless. Are there, vice versa, interpretations that feel definitive to you?

Sometimes, when a performer has put a tremendous amount of time and thought into a composition, and they are able to understand at a very fine level what exactly makes a given piece work, it can become difficult to imagine how it could be played differently.

Often, this is as a result of close collaboration with the composer, but not always. I don’t think that one needs to let that deter them from engaging with the piece - often I feel that we should take the past with a grain of salt and strive too hard to create copies.

I think a careful and selfless engagement with the piece will often yield interpretations that are both faithful to the composer’s vision as well as personal to the performer.