Lawrence Dutton: Emerson String Quartet

Violist of the Emerson String Quartet that won 9 GRAMMYS, Lawrence Dutton talks about his life before the quartet, collaborations and stories from the Emerson Quartet, and gives his advice for aspiring professional musicians. 

Transcript

Hey everyone, welcome to the Backstage Classical Career Conversations podcast. I’m your host, Katrina Stroud, and I’m a classical violinist who started playing at the age of three. I graduated from the Robert McDuffie Center for Strings at Mercer University with my bachelor’s in violin performance, and I’m pursuing my master’s in music at the University of Michigan.

In this series, I invite esteemed classical musicians onto the show and interview them to tell their stories and preserve their legacies. 

I am honored to be able to interview Lawrence Dutton today, the violist of the Emerson String Quartet, which has been considered one of the greatest string quartets in the world for over four decades, has won 9 GRAMMYS awards and made over 40 acclaimed recordings.

Mr. Dutton has collaborated with other famous musicians such as Isaac Stern. Renée Fleming, Mstislav Rostropovich, among many others.He has also performed with the Juilliard Quartet, Guarneri Quartet, and the Beaux Arts Trio. Mr. Dutton has performed as a soloist with many American and European orchestras, and appears as a guest artist on many music festivals.

He is currently a distinguished professor of viola and chamber music at the Stony Brook University in New York and a distinguished artist at the Robert McDuffie center for Strings in Macon, Georgia. He earned his bachelor’s and masters degree at the Juilliard School of Music and has 5 honorary doctorates. In May 2024, he and the other members of the Emerson String Quartet received honorary doctorates from the Juilliard School.

The Emerson String Quartet were recipients of the Avery Fisher Award in 2004 and were inducted into the American Classical Music Hall of Fame in 2010, along with many other awards. 

Thank you so much for joining me today on the show. So you first started studying violin with Margaret Pardee. What made you want to switch to viola?

So, to look back at where I’m coming from, I grew up on Long Island, Wantagh, and my parents didn’t know anything about music. And they brought us all, us third graders at the end of the year, down to the auditorium, and they demonstrated all the strings. They had a string concert of the older classmen, and they invited us to come after school if we wanted to see the instruments. 

And I went in and I saw the violin, and I said, “wow, that’s what I want, I want to play that thing,” and signed up for lessons. My parents were okay with that. They didn’t know anything. They said, “well, alright, you know, why don’t you try it, what the heck”, and I started taking lessons in fourth grade. Wonderful man named Eugene Kahn, very important for helping, because we didn't know anything, and my parents didn't know anything. And I studied with him.

He took me around to all the various string competitions, and youth orchestras around. And then after several years, he came to my mother and said, actually, he needs a better teacher. And I have a friend, and she's an amazing teacher from Juilliard, her name is Margaret Pardee.

And he took me to her, and she accepted me as a student. For people who don't know, Margaret Pardee was one of the three assistants to the great violin pedagogue Ivan Galamian, who is considered in many ways the father of modern violin school of playing. And he taught some major important people, like it's a permanent Michael Rabin and Pinchas Zukerman.

And then out of those three teachers, of course, Dorothy DeLay became a very important pedagogue after Galamian passed. So I was lucky to have Margaret Pardee, and eventually she'd said I should go to Juilliard Pre-College, which was on Saturdays, and I started to do that. And then in my last year of high school, I started playing some viola.

She just thought, because of my size, I should try to do that and really enjoyed it. I liked the sound. It felt comfortable.

I think, you know, it was kind of a better fit for me. The plan was at that moment to audition for Lillian Fuchs, who was one of the great violists, a teacher at Juilliard. 

Because of things that were happening with my family, at the time, I could not really afford to live in the city. So I made a decision, which was really right, because I needed to get away from home, kind of like going abroad or whatever. I ended up going to Eastman School of Music for a couple of years, which was just perfect. I had a wonderful teacher there, Francis Tursi, a great man, a great teacher.

I realized after a couple of years, I needed to get back to Juilliard and called Ms. Fuchs. She accepted me again, went to Juilliard. Then I spent the next four years at Juilliard, getting my bachelor's and master's.

Yeah, that's amazing. So what was your time like at Juilliard, and do you have any stories to share from that time?

Yeah, because I knew some people from Juilliard pre-college. When I came back, I was fortunate that people knew I was coming, knew me, and they asked me if I want to play in some chamber music groups and some string quartets. And that was fantastic.

And I got to meet some very special people. And he's very well known now. He's an old friend, Daniel Phillips.

He played in the Orion Quartet, and Dan was still teaching and playing. And, you know, I see him occasionally. But he had a roommate named Ira Weller who has passed.

But both of them were studying with Galamian. And they had this amazing apartment. And you could play music all the time. It wouldn't disturb nobody in the building. It's actually the same building that Galamian lived in, which is incredible. But the walls are very thick.

And we could read chamber music all night. Daniel really knew and understood Haydn. He understood what Haydn quartets were about.

And so did Ira. Ira grew up in Buffalo, when he knew the Budapest Quartet was actually in residence in Buffalo when he was growing up, which is incredible. So these guys would just invite people.

I mean, amazing people, of course. Yo-Yo would show up and Kim Kashkashain. And we'd play viola quintets.

You know, all kinds of great, great people would just come. I mean, we were kids then, you know. And we'd read chamber music like all night.

I think I read every single Haydn quartet. We'd spend the whole night and go out for breakfast, you know. And that was in many ways what you call now like networking or whatever.

But that was in many ways the most important time outside of Juilliard was making those kinds of friends, learning or getting exposed to that kind of music. We would listen to all kinds of recordings. They had an old 78 record player and we'd be listening to old Kreisler recordings.

Charlie Wadsworth, all these amazing singers, and John McCormack on these old 78s. And it was really an amazing time for me because I didn't know a heck of a lot. So everything was new to me.

And then, of course, the Juilliard time was very important. And I feel, wow, what amazing people we had at Juilliard at that time. We had, obviously, the founder of the Juilliard Quartet, Robert Mann, was still very much there.

And the whole Juilliard Quartet, of course, I actually became very good friends with his son, Nicholas Mann. Still was a dear friend and played all kinds of music with all kinds of people eventually. So that was an important influence.

Also Felix Galimir, he knew Schoenberg, he knew Berg when he was in Vienna. I mean, so he did with his three sisters, they had a string quartet. He did the actual first recording of the Ravel String Quartet, and Ravel was there.

Okay, so that's incredible. Those kind of connections are, we don't have that anymore, right? I mean, we have some connection with new composers alive, but thinking about what was going on in the world.

So yeah, I had a pretty great time at Juilliard with the chamber music. I eventually became, I think they didn't call it TA at that point for Sam Rhodes, and the Juilliard quartet was out of town. I would coach his quartets, and I was exposed to a lot of the chamber music was what I really fell in love with, and actually even when I was in Eastman, I was in love with the chamber music.

To be honest, that's probably what it was just meant to be. I was going in that direction right from the get-go.

So what were your goals after you graduated with your master's degree?

Okay, so actually it's important in my last year to get my master's. Three things happened, and I was lucky that I made the right choice. It's interesting if you think, and you'll probably have this at some point in your life, and you'll go like, wow, I made the right decision or something.

I remember being at Juilliard, and there was a sign on room 309, which was the old rehearsal room. I said, if you want to play for a conductor, a Carl Bohringer, he was the conductor of the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra. I was like, well, take it in addition, what the heck?

I didn't know what I was going to do. I knew that at the end of the year, I was going to be done with school, and I had already started some freelancing, and you just do that in New York. So I took this audition, and that was early on, and then months later, I got called down to the dean's office.

I was thinking like, wow, what I do? I'm in trouble or something. And they had, and listen, you might not even know what this is, but it was a teletype or teletext, I don't even know what they call it.

Basically, typed out message was how they used to send messages. It was like even before fax machines and stuff. And they had received it.

It was in German, but somebody translated it. And it was from the conductor, and he was apologizing because he had been on tour and he didn't have a chance. But he was inviting me to become solo violist, or principal violist of the Stuttgart Chamber Symphony.

And they're saying, that's very good. That's a very good job. You should take that.

And I'm thinking, wow, yeah, this was actually the year before I was going to graduate. So it was the year before my last year at Juilliard. Then I go, and I take it to my teacher, Lillian Fuchs. And I show her and I said, I should do this, right? And she said, no.

She used to call me boy. You no, boy, you're going to come back and study with me next year. I was like, okay, Ms. Fuchs, that's how we work.

We didn’t argue with our teachers. Whatever she said went. So that was the end of that.

I didn't go to Stuttgart, which would have been, like, can you imagine that? That trajectory? I probably, who the heck knows? I'd probably be retiring from the Berlin Philharmonic at this point, right? Or something. Maybe. I'd probably speak German very well. But anyway, that didn't happen. I didn't do that.

Then I got a call to take an audition for, this is funny, this is — I’m dating myself now. Emerson, Lake and Palmer, if you know what that is, old rock and roll band.

They were big in the 70s. They were playing like stadiums. They'd been going on the road for like, I don't know, nine months with an orchestra.

They were hiring out an orchestra. I accepted that, and I had to turn it down. Because I said, that's going to be, what am I going to do? I'll be in bad shape by the end of that tour. That would not be very good. So I got out of that one.

And the next thing that happened, which was the right choice, so I'm 22 years old. And there I met, here we go back to the networking or whatever you want to call it. I'm reading chamber music at the apartment there with Danny and Ira, and Jerry Grossman.

Jerry Grossman is one of the principal cellists of the Metropolitan Orchestra. And I played a lot with Jerry before he was even in the Met. And we were playing in Orpheus at that time.

I was subbing in Orpheus occasionally. Guillermo Figueroa, who was my predecessor, had left. So they were looking for a violist, the Emerson Quartet.

This was not only after they had started. I mean, this was like eight months after they had decided to become a quartet. Guillermo left.

I knew Guillermo. I knew him from Orpheus too. So Jerry knew Phil Setzer. And he mentioned, hey, you want somebody to audition. Whatever he said, I don't know what he said. But I had a chance to audition and there were 11 violas.

I got it. I didn’t have a lot of experience, but I was a quick learner and I had a lot of passion, you know, so I was lucky. So then I got on the Emerson and the end of the year before my last year, I was very fortunate because I could finish Juilliard.

I finished Juilliard the next year where I was in the quartet. I was already in the quartet. So when I got in the Emerson, I had just turned 23 years old.

Yeah, I was very fortunate just to be in there at the right time, right?

Yeah, well, fortunate and talented, of course. You won that audition and you did have experience from the sight reading you said.

So I'm sure that helped a lot. I had the passion for playing chamber music and that's what I wanted to do.

What was that audition like for the Emerson quartet?

Oh, I mean, you know, we... I didn't know a heck of a lot of quartets. I had to learn real fast.

You know what this is like. You're working on, say, one piece at school. One piece and you're spending whatever. How much time you spend? Well, it's up to you guys. Whatever you decide. You do a bunch of rehearsing. You can rehearse a while, you can rehearse a little. But it's one piece.

Immediately, I had to learn six pieces, like in a month. Wow. Like, holy crap, what am I doing here? You know, it was really a real catch-up thing for me.

Did you have to sit down and read full works with the quartet? Or was it just like excerpts?

Oh, sure. Oh, sure.

No, that was the whole process. Yeah, absolutely. Discuss, rehearse, and kind of figure out if that's going to work.

At that point, it was the original guys with Eugene Drucker, Philip Setzer, and Eric Wilson. So Eric, the cellist, I was with him for two years. And so I was with him from May of 77 is when I joined the Emerson, I think the summer of 79.

And then he left, so that's when David joined in the fall of 1979. And then that was the real Emerson Quartet, you could say. And that lasted 34 years from that point.

Wow. That's amazing. So what was your solo career like? And what made you want to switch to a full-time chamber career?

Well, that's it. You know, what is a solo career. How many people have a solo career, right?

And what does that really entail? I mean, there's really just a handful of great instrumentalists that can make a career performing by themselves on stage. How few are that, right?

I mean, and you're talking about viola. There's no such animal. To be honest, there's no solo career for viola.

William Primrose, like the greatest violist that we ever had, was playing in the NBC Symphony. Now, a lot of people were playing NBC Symphony because everybody loved Toscanini, and he was like this amazing teacher, a brilliant, brilliant musician that everybody adored. You had some of the greatest instrumentalists in that orchestra.

But Primrose, he talked, he ended up at USC. He was teaching around in all different places and stuff like that. He did chamber music, he did a lot of different things.

Lillian Fuchs was teaching a lot and that aspect hasn't changed. I mean, this really, the good thing though, is from that very early period. Chamber music and string quartets particularly had become a much more viable profession to go into you can actually make money.

We were very fortunate. We came at a great time. In our heyday, we were playing as many as 120 concerts a year.

That was crazy. We always had some kind of teaching. We were at the Hartt School of Music in Residence.

I wasn't teaching a lot in terms of viola at that point. I was doing more chamber music. Even when we got to Stony Brook, that was in 2002.

That was really still just coaching quartets. We didn't really start getting into full-time teaching of viola until like 2010 or 2011. Things have changed that way and I find out that's become important to me.

Yeah. You have collaborated with so many incredible musicians. Who were some of the most memorable and why?

Oh, boy. Well, it's an endless list actually. Going back, obviously our time with Mstislav Rostropovich was one of the very, very special times.

Recording Schubert Cello Quintet with him, performing with him, just being with him, eating with him, drinking with him, all that. He was larger than life. He was an amazing personality.

I mean, a real ambassador for music in a way that we need more of those kind of people. He could talk to anybody. That was the case even late in his life.

We got to spend a lot of time with Isaac Stern, which was wonderful. We did some playing with Isaac. William Bolcom wrote a piece for Isaac.

He was playing second violin and it was very sweet. It was a piano quintet. So he had all these great pianists come through and people coming in.

But it was also hanging out with Mr. Stern. Carnegie, he had these, I think, called chamber music encounters, which he also did in Jerusalem, in Israel. And that was magnificent to be there.

And that was in the late 90s. And it was incredible to be there. And teaching with Leon Fleisher, he was another one.

Leon was very special. We recorded with Leon and performed a bunch. We recorded the Brahms Quintet with Leon. He was such an amazing musician and really incredible to be with. 

It's a big list. Walter Trampler was very special to me. He was the original violist of the Chamber Music Society at Lincoln Center. He was also a good friend with the Budapest Quartet. He recorded most of the great literature of the viola quintet with the Budapest. He joined us a lot. He was great support to me personally. He was very special.

Oh, there's so many. We had some fun ones. One of our fans actually was Paul Newman, the great actor, also a race car driver, but he was a chamber music fan.

And he loved the Emerson Quartet. I mean, who knew. And we got to know, when he hit his 80th birthday, he invited us to come and play for his 80th birthday, which was really cool.

So that was like amazing. And then a couple of months later, he invited us to do this charity concert at Lincoln Center, at the Avery Fischer Hall, the Hole in the Wall Gang. It's what he does with the salad dressings, all that money goes to the Hole in the Wall gang, his charity.

That still was the case. He had a whole bunch of his friends performing on this concert, like Tony Bennett and Robert Williams and Paul McCartney. Paul McCartney.

So he called up and he said, I was talking to Paul. Phil had this ridiculous conversation. He said, he's talking to Paul.

And I'm like, what? Yeah, Paul McCartney, he knows you guys are coming. He'd love to play with you. So we got to play with Paul McCartney. That was fun. That was back in — wow — in 2005, I think it was, yeah, that was cool. Yeah, so, you know, we've had those kind of fun things too. 

It's a big list. I could go through everybody. One person is very important was Menahem Pressler from the Beaux-Arts Trio. He was with us from the very beginning.

He was kind of like really one of our most important early mentors. We played with him the first summer I was in the quartet.

The manager, Melvin Kaplan, at that time had a music festival called Vermont Mozart Festival. It doesn't exist anymore. But he had Menahem there, he managed Menahem.

He put us together with Menahem. I mean, he was intense and I learned a heck of a lot from him. He got us to really commit to making music, that's for sure. And if we weren’t, we knew about it very soon.

Yeah, that's amazing that you had so many people and so many collaborations. So beautiful. What was recording with the Emerson Quartet like and how was recording different from performing live?

Well, it's kind of a cliché, but it is important that live is live, right? Live is getting out there and just doing it. You're on stage and you made a mistake, that's life, you know. You just keep going. 

People say, well, live is like doing live theater. And making a recording is like making a movie.

So, when you make a recording, you have to make decisions about your interpretation. You have to believe in your interpretation. And you have to agree on the interpretation with the other members.

You're trying to find the best musical feeling to put down as what you believe in. That's hard. That's really hard.

You could get yourself crazy with it. I felt for myself, I think recording is very tough. I think it's, in a sense, it's almost better just to record live and maybe have a few patch things, if there's some disasters or whatever.

But when you actually sit down and you're trying to make a recording and you're thinking about some incredible standards of recordings before you, you really can mess your brain up. What I realized is that when we were making recordings of the great repertoire, the Beethoven, the Schubert, whatever, I was listening to some recordings. I listened to some great recordings.

Then at a certain point, I realized, yeah, no, no, we have another way to do this. We have another interpretation and that's good. You realize, oh, yeah, I think this could be done this way and it hasn't been done.

It's different and that's the beauty of music. There's no end to interpretation. Making a recording, you just do your best and you step away from it. It's always like you don't even remember. 

It's a great story. I love this story. Arnold Steinhardt, who was the first violinist of the Guaneri Quartet. He called Phil frantically one day. He said he was driving and this recording came on on the radio. It was QXR, whatever, around New York.

He's driving, but he didn't know who was playing. It was Beethoven Quartet 18. 6 or something, I think it was. He said, gosh, who is this, huh? Very good, very good. He stopped the car to hear it and said, it's good, it's a little youthful. I bet it's the Emerson Quartet.

It sounds incredible. It gets to the end of the recording. He's convinced it's us and then it comes on and it says, that was the Guarneri String Quartet.

I love that so much. I love that because you have some idea maybe of what you had produced and what your recording sounds like and then you hear something and you can't believe that would be you. I had that same, actually a very similar experience, listening to a recording and I heard something and I was like, what the heck?

What did we do that? Did we do that? I don't think we did that. It was something about some tempo thing. I was like, what the heck was that? Did we let that go?

It's fine. It's something only you sense. You get too close to it in a way and in the end, it is what it is.

So recording is challenging. Recording is challenging, that's for sure.

Yes. What were rehearsals like for the Emerson Quartet? What was the typical rehearsal schedule or what was the dynamic like?

Well, interesting about our group, we were four very different people and the great thing about our quartet is that we had respect for each other and great respect for each other. Even though we're coming from many different places completely.

I tell students that all the time. You're going to rehearse, it has to be done with respect, you have to give criticism and you have to take criticism without being offended. So that means you have to be able to give criticism in a way that's not destructive. That doesn't accomplish anything.

And I've seen many a group. I mean, there's great histories of quartets breaking up because of personalities not getting along.

Even though we were all very different, we got along, which was miraculous in many ways. I mean, relationships are challenging. It's not unlike having a marriage. You’re together a heck of a lot. And in the early days, sure, we had to rehearse all the time. We were rehearsing like crazy.

We had a lot of repertoire because I think, because we had Gene and Phil both playing first and second violins. So, in a way, we could do more repertoire because of that. It took a lot of work.

But we had a great chemistry. We just did. And even after David left, we had 10 years with Paul Watkins, the final 10 years.

Paul is amazing and just a great, great musician. We all had incredible respect for him, even though he's almost 20 years younger than Phil, but he's a brilliant, brilliant musician. So, I can honestly say the Emerson Quartet, probably one of the most fortunate quartets that ever lived in terms of all that, being able to get along and rehearse and do all that stuff.

It was good. Yeah.

What was it like winning your first Grammy and then the eight that came after that?

Well, actually, the first Grammy was actually two. We got, it was for the Bartok. It was for the year 1989.

We received it in February of 1990. That's how it works. It goes back.

So, 1989, and we got the best chamber music, and we got the best classical album of the year, which was a big deal because we were up against other winners of their perspective fields, such as the opera category with James Levine. The orchestral winner was Leonard Bernstein. Wow.

So, we beat them out for the best classical. That was pretty cool. We actually had dinner with both of them, as a matter of fact, and Deutsche Grammophon because we were all in Deutsche Grammaphon, we were all of the same label at that point.

So, what was cool about that? So, we won two in that first year and soon after that, we won the Gramophone Award and the British Award in London, Gramophone Magazine Award. And we had a concert and they did the awards actually in the early afternoon.

But we had a concert in outside of New York, like upstate on that same night. But they really wanted us to go because we actually won the two awards there. We won the Chamber of Music and the Best Album.

So they said, okay, well, we can fly you over. This is in the good days of the recording industry. They flew us over on the Concorde and they flew us back on the Concorde, so we could make our concert.

So we flew and stayed at the Savoy, did the awards ceremony, jumped back on the Concorde, got back into JFK and then we got on a private jet and flew up to where, I forgot where it was, but upstate New York and made our concert. Wow. Not bad, right?

That's pretty cool.

Yeah. That doesn't happen anymore. Those were the heydays of the recording industry.

They’d go overboard with that kind of stuff. They’re like, yeah take the Concorde, no problem.

Yeah. So do you have any other memorable stories from the quartet that you would like to share either of performances or recording or just working with people? Wow.

Well, yeah. I mean, it comes back to Rostropovich. I don't mind sharing this story.

It's a little bit absurd, but it shows you the extreme life style that man could have. But we got together. We were doing a recording on the Schubert Cello Quintet.

We were in Heidelberg, but we were doing in a town near Heidelberg called Spire. It was a great old church, Baroque style church. It was all wood.

So it was a beautiful sounding space and we had full access to it. So we were staying in Heidelberg and we went over, oh, several nights before and seeing Rostropovich rehearsing. The people that were sponsoring was a German company called BASF, which was a big oil company, a chemical company, and they were sponsoring the recording.

They had a party or a dinner for us and Rostropovich. It was actually in the middle of the recording, which was crazy. But it was, you know, after a whole day of recording.

We were going to record the slow movement of the Schubert Cello Quintet the next day. Okay. So we go to this dinner, and it's one of those, like, seven course dinners with wine pairings.

Okay. So we're drinking and eating this amazing food and having wonderful wine. And about halfway through the meal, the owner comes and says he wants to take us for some wine tasting in his cellar, which is down into the ground, which was really amazing.

The cellar was from 800 AD. It was really old, really old. And it was a heck of a wine cellar.

And it had a dirt floor. So there was this huge table, old table, and big glasses and wine bottles. And there's Rostropovich.

And Rostropovich, his concept of wine tasting was really filling up the glass almost full. That was his concept of wine tasting. And he's got David, because David had studied with him, had followed Rostropovich around the world taking lessons from him.

And Slava never charged him. I mean, he was amazing. It's amazing. He was a big mentor to David. And he's got David wrapped around. He's making drinks.

So they're drinking like full glasses of wine. I'm like at this point dumping it, because I didn't, I thank God it was a dirt floor. I was gone.

After about, I don't know how many of these, crawl back upstairs and finish this seven course meal. But next morning, bright and early 10 o'clock. We're supposed to come in and record the slow movement.

None of us were really in good shape. It was bad. And we kind of go in, you know, it was really bad.

The slow bows, nothing going on. And even so we play like maybe half the movement. We go listen and I'll never forget Slava goes.

I think we all go home. We all go back to hotel and take nap. So that's it.

We all go back. That's it. That was the end of the session for the morning.

We all take a nap, a long nap and we come back in the early evening. I kid you not, it was one of the greatest recording sessions I think we ever had. I think we did like one take that most like the recording you hear, it's like almost just one take, maybe a few things fixed, but it was snowing, it was actually magic and we just were there.

We were rested and but that's how Slava lived. That's a crazy story. It was hard to stick up with him, but he could live on such a high level, like just move through life doing, he was something unique.

They don't make people like that so much anymore.

Yeah. He was an amazing cellist and that's an amazing recording too. I love your recording of the Schubert Cello Quintet, it's so beautiful.

What is life like after the Emerson Quartet and do you still stay in touch with the members?

Yeah, we're actually pretty excited now. In the last year, a film was being done on the quartet. It's going to be a documentary, it's called Four Rational People, that's the name of the movie.

It's a documentary, it's going to be like an hour and a half documentary. I've seen one early screen of it and we're pretty excited about it. You'll hear more about it.

It will happen and go to film festivals, I hope, and who knows. But it's been done and so that's a way, of course, we're all still involved in that. Yeah, I mean, it's funny getting adjusted to post-Semester.

Do I miss it? I don't miss what we used to do, which was travel so much and traveling is not getting any more fun. 

Do I miss the repertoire? It's all in my brain. I could conjure up most of the repertoire in my head. Playing string quartet, I did it the best I could and I can't do it any better.

So I'm not interested in doing it any more. I do enjoy, though, doing a lot of collaborations. You know, it's a heck of a lot of repertoire.

I'm doing a bunch of stuff for the Chamber Music Society and I run concert series in Bronx, New York and Greenwich. So, yeah, I mean, I can be busier. People are still calling me to do stuff.

And I enjoy it because it's repertoire I didn't know as well or didn't perform as many times. I mean, if you're going to ask me to play the Dvorak American Quartet, I'd say, don't think so. I think 200 times is maybe enough for me on that piece.

I'll teach it, I'll teach it, but I'm not going to play it. But I'm happy to play the Mozart Divertimento because that's something you don't get to do. Or a viola quintet, I love playing viola quintets too.

That's all that stuff. So I feel like I'm still really busy. I mean, I'm full-time professor at Stony Brook, obviously, and I still come down to the Robert McDuffie Center and do that once a month and enjoy that immensely and so, yeah.

Yeah, that's amazing. Yeah, I know there's still so much, like music is never-ending. So much you can do with it.It never ends. Never ends.

I always close out with this one question. What advice would you give to aspiring professional musicians?

My wife's a violinist and she freelances. She knows this business pretty well in New York. She's been in this business for, I don't know, 30 or 40 years too.

I think what you have to be able to do is be able to get your playing up to a level. You have to be consistent. I think people want consistency.

They want people that are professional. They want people to be respectful and to understand what it is, whether you're playing in a chamber orchestra or you're playing on Broadway. I mean, Broadway is an important part of a freelance musician.

Can you make a career doing chamber music? I mean, you can, but at this point, you have to be able to be creative. The young quartets that have worked with the Emerson, they all know how to handle social media and how to make recordings.

You have to be able to make recordings yourself now and be able to do your own publicity and all that stuff. If you want to be a professional musician, you've got to be willing to work really hard. That's really what it comes down to.

I don't think there's any magic steps. If you're going to try to get an orchestral job, you're going to have to know the excerpts backwards and forwards. You need to get experience taking those auditions because there's hundreds of people out there taking those auditions.

That's the difference maybe between the time that when we were starting out, I think things have changed. It's that ways that things are better, things may be more competitive now. There's many more people out there trying to make career.

So there's no magic solution. You just have to prepare yourself and get yourself to the best ability that you can and be patient.

Yeah, that's great advice. Thank you so much. Thank you for coming on the show and for your contribution to the classical music world. It's really been amazing being able to work with you and interview you. 

I hope that hearing Lawrence Dutton's stories from his career in one of the most eminent string quartets of all time, inspired everyone as much as it inspired me. Go listen to the Emerson String Quartet recordings on any music platform, and you can find Mr. Dutton teaching at the Stony Brook University and the Robert McDuffie Center for Strings.

Thank you so much for joining me on Backstage Classical Career Conversations, and be sure to subscribe to the show and rate us on the platform you're using. To donate to the show to help us keep creating content, click on the support link in the description. I'm Katrina Stroud and it was great to see you here.

Until next time, stay inspired and listen to the stories of others.