Dorothy Lawson: ETHEL's String Theory for Quartets
As ETHEL prepares for their first Carnegie Hall performance, Dorothy Lawson reflects on decades of mixing classical precision with popular music's spirit.
Today, the Spotlight shines On legendary cellist Dorothy Lawson.
Dorothy and the group ETHEL have spent years breaking down walls between classical, jazz, rock and world music.
On March 13th at New York's Carnegie Hall, Dorothy teams up with bass legend Ron Carter to reimagine his landmark Kronos Quartet recording from 40 years ago, featuring arrangements of music by Thelonious Monk.
Dorothy shares how ETHEL has evolved through four generations of musicians, their unique residency at the Metropolitan Museum, and why making deeply human music matters now more than ever.
(The musical excerpts heard in the interview are from the album Vigil by ETHEL & Layale Chaker)
Dig Deeper
• Purchase ETHEL's music from Bandcamp or Qobuz and listen on your streaming platform of choice
• Follow ETHEL on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube
• ETHEL Uses Chamber Music to Smash the Status Quo
• Ron Carter & ETHEL: Reflections on Monk & Bach - Carnegie Hall
• Ron Carter and ETHEL - "Black and Tan Fantasy"
• The Met Museum – Balcony Bar Residency - ETHEL
• ETHEL, Thomas Dolby, and David Byrne - "(Nothing But) Flowers"
(This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.)
Lawrence Peryer: Well, thank you for making time. I think you might be the busiest cellist in show business. (laughter)
Dorothy Lawson: No, I don't think so. If you knew the New York scene, it's a tribe. We do a lot of that. That's where ETHEL began. That's what we grew out of—this beautiful, crazy mix of cultures and styles and opportunities and media—and allowing that to really be an inspiration.
There are many people to whom it's just too much. They'd rather have a more dependable environment. But in New York, if you enjoy it and you benefit from it, you will get opportunities like no other. You'll really have a range of experience and connections, relationships that personally have meant everything to me.
Lawrence: You're already touching on a lot of the themes that I wanted to get into with you, but one that strikes me right off the bat is ETHEL seems to me as though it's a uniquely New York phenomenon. Not that it couldn't happen anywhere else, but in line with what you were just saying, New York just represents such a confluence of creative music and jazz and contemporary pop, and of course, the institutions that are there. Does that resonate at all?
Dorothy: Absolutely. To be fair, I would say that every city is like that—they're all unique. We all have opportunities, limits, institutions, and personalities, people who tend to dominate the scene.
The thing that really grounded me in New York and the thing I fell in love with about it was that it's less xenophobic than a lot of places. You are as much a New Yorker the moment you put your foot on the street and start walking. We expect that there are engagements where we don't understand each other's languages or we come from different religious perspectives. People have their feelings about that, but we basically tolerate everybody. We tolerate each other, and I think there can be a human environment.
I've lived in environments where the expectations are more limited and there's more resistance to that kind of modulation that has to go both ways. It's more of an insistence that there's a dominant way to do things and you're just going to have to work with that.
Lawrence: Yeah, more than anything else, you have to work with New York. (laughter) I'm from the Northeast originally. I grew up in Connecticut. I spent about twenty years in New York, and there's a handful of experiences that New Yorkers have in common. One of them is that bizarre phenomenon we all exhibit where we could be in the middle of New York and run into somebody that we hadn't seen in like twenty or thirty years. That's one of the strangest tropes that comes up from people who spent time in New York.
Dorothy: That is real. That's for sure.
Lawrence: Yeah, but something else that struck me, and it was just this morning, was I saw the announcement of your shows in the spring with Ron Carter. Congratulations.
Dorothy: One very special show, one very special show.
Lawrence: Oh, one show.
Dorothy: Yes, one night only. You're so excited and grateful, and I've known Ron for about twenty-five years. I've known him a long time because one of his projects is his jazz quintet with four cellos up front. He calls it his nonet, the Ron Carter Nonet, and I've been one of those cellists for a very long time and loved it.
Again, it's one of those things that just grew out of the New York opportunity spectrum. I knew one of the cellists who had originated that group. The group itself has existed for more than fifty years, I think, but I knew one of the original cellists who would need to repopulate the group now and then, and he invited me. I was delighted and I've done it every time I could since then.
Ron is the most amazing, lucid, generous, genteel, elegant, brilliant person and musician. And in this phase of his life—he's now eighty-seven—he, of course, is continuing to perform. He's traveling—he even did a tour to Japan just a couple of months ago. Where he can, he is giving advice and lending support to younger artists, and he is on ETHEL's board. He's one of our board members. He is a steady contributor of energy, information, and ideas.
When we proposed to him that we do an event playing with him and make it our benefit for this year—this is going to be a benefit concert to support ETHEL, to help us keep our lights on—he was absolutely delighted. And he's the one who came up with the program: music that he recorded forty years ago with the Kronos Quartet, when they were first building their brand. They did a series of records with eminent jazz musicians, and the one that they recorded with him was arrangements of music by Thelonious Monk.
He's very proud of that record, but they never played it live. So he was saying to us, "Hey, how about we do this?" And we're like, "Oh my gosh, that's the best." We get to do something which is musically significant, historically significant, in partnership with one of our favorite musicians of all time and celebrate him, celebrate Kronos, celebrate Thelonious Monk, and celebrate ETHEL.
So it is one concert, at Carnegie's Zankel Hall, which is their downstairs medium-sized venue. And it's on Thursday, March 13th at 7:30 p.m. Please, anybody who's available, we would love to have you there. It's going to be epic.
Lawrence: Yeah, that sounds wonderful. Did I read correctly that this is ETHEL's first time playing Carnegie Hall? Tell me I got that wrong.
Dorothy: Yeah, no, I know. I think ETHEL has been in a way too populist for Carnegie right from the beginning. Our music, our composers, our style was deeply related to rock and pop and jazz and world music. And we weren't standing on ceremony. We felt that the historical string quartet canon and the composers who really followed in that path were already very well represented, that they had many of the best performers in the world continuing that tradition.
And we felt that our opportunity was to do music by the people who had been pushed aside, but their music wasn't as accepted in academia. Of course, they've won their places—I'd say since then they have won their places. We just found that very exciting. We thought that was valid, and one of the first—probably the very, very first project we did together where we hadn't identified as a quartet yet—was some original music for string quartet to accompany dance with the Pennsylvania Ballet.
Lawrence: Who assembled the quartet initially then? Did the composer bring you together? How did that happen? What's the big bang there?
Dorothy: We actually had two opportunities pretty much at the same time. One was a recording project, and that one, they had approached one of the original violinists, Todd Reynolds. So he called this group that he thought would be fabulous for this. It was a jazz recording, and he called us together to play for it.
Simultaneously, John King went to the other violinist who was in this group, Mary Rowell. He and Mary had known each other for years and years, and it was this blues-based music, and Mary called the same group together. So that was really kind of fun. We just thought, "Hey, we like each other. This is going to be good." You can't ignore that when it keeps working.
Lawrence: In the decision to sort of stay together and continue beyond the initial project, I'm kind of curious about the New York new music scene of the mid-late nineties, what was going on? And as an ensemble, did the four of you see a lane that you could uniquely fill? Was it this populist approach that you saw missing? What was kind of the call to arms, if you will?
Dorothy: We live with some of the residue. The twentieth century had really driven itself into more and more of these very specific academic corners. And that was, I would say, largely economic. Composers made reasonable livings in academia, in colleges.
They made good money, they got time in the summers, they got sabbaticals, they got breaks so they could really do their creative work. But one of the side effects in academia is you have to publish and you have to defend your reputation, your position among your peers.
So the composers in academia were becoming more and more self-referential. Thanks to the academic environment, they were less sensitive to and less attached to the attendance and interest and buy-in of the audience. There were these growing separations where I know for myself, I played twenty years after college, I played twenty years of music that was very, very hard to relate to. It was very hard to perform, but it was also for an audience, an extremely specialized kind of experience. It was exhausting for one thing because you're not getting a lot of warm response on your performances, and I think it was misguided.
I think that years and years of extremely fine compositional thinking was siloed in this area where I'm not sure how much of it is really ever going to come back. And what was happening at the end of the twentieth century was that the economics underneath that were breaking down. The presenters, the environment where you have to make money at it, bringing people in for their experience, for their entertainments—their audiences were not showing up. The audiences sort of said, "I don't get it. I don't relate to it. It doesn't really refer to me. I don't need to spend this money."
The presenters were getting very scared. They weren't able to reignite the interest in their audience. There was just a moment where everyone agreed, we got to try something new. It's going to be a little different. We'll see what people will buy a ticket for, what they're responding to.
At that moment, we were among those early adapters. We had already begun. We wanted to play music with popular references, with colloquial musical language. Honestly, our first big break with management was a big company that just came to us and said, "Hey, let's try this." And they put us out there. They sent us out on the national tour. We were busy, busy, busy, but it wasn't very scientific. It was just, "They look cool. They're doing something that relates to popular music. Let's try that."
But they're classical. They're acceptable. You know, they're acceptable, but they're doing this other thing. And it was true—we all had all the training, all the right credentials, huge amounts of experience with straight classical music, but we were really sympathetic to, eager to play music that related to the sounds that we ourselves enjoyed and the sounds we had grown up with.
So that was kind of the thing. I think it is worth remembering that it is a business and that the economics and the exchange with an audience is entirely about what do we do that you need. What can we provide that you would pay us for? And so we paid very close attention to what the audience is really demonstrating when they choose their entertainment.
Lawrence: It's really interesting because in some regards, you could almost imagine an alternative universe where—first of all, that context you provided on how the role academia played both positive and how it created some of the current challenges in the music was really helpful for me—but you could really imagine an alternate universe where it wasn't that long ago where what I would put in air quotes "high art" was in the popular consciousness through figures like Bernstein or Itzhak Perlman or even Baryshnikov. There's a piece in The New York Times today about "Is Mikhail Baryshnikov the last high art superstar," and it really makes that—sets him in that lineage of people who could transcend popular and esoteric, and it's fascinating.
Dorothy: Oh, for sure. And justly so. I mean, I worked with Baryshnikov for several years. Thank you for bringing that up. This does relate to my age and my parents and the generation that I grew up with—they had lived through the Second World War. And there was that kind of burst of abundance after the Second World War. But there was also a lot of PTSD. People were traumatized. It was a terrible conflict. It was worldwide families. I don't know if there were families anywhere that weren't touched by it.
There really was a kind of a despondence after the Second World War that maybe it would happen again. People almost thought, "When will the third one happen?" I have come to believe that this super sacred, reverential environment that we've created for classical music was a healing technique.
People were worried and scared, and there was that thought that humanity was at its nature so bad, so evil, so destined to continue these warring and self-annihilating habits that humanity was bad, just evil. And these were temples of a different belief, of restoring the faith that humanity could also do the highest good.
For a lot of us, the high, gorgeous art of museums and fine performances and great music was something to hold on to, something to believe in. I think that's where that environment—where the old guard would be so offended if young people came in and weren't reverent. If you weren't dressed right, if you didn't sit quietly and listen and applaud at the right moment—that was such a highly quoted set of conditions. The most sympathetic explanation I've come to is that it was actually really restorative, really helped people feel good about who we are, what we're destined to do.
Through the eighties and the nineties, and then kind of up to the breakdown around 2000, the business model around music, around presenting of almost every kind—certainly in classical music—was a star system. It was a conscious business strategy. Let's focus our advertising dollars at the audience's attention. Let's get a group of these superstar guys, we'll pummel the audience with their names. There's no accident—American Express ads, everything—there's no accident that everybody knows Yo-Yo Ma.
Lawrence: We could only have one cellist at a time.
Dorothy: Exactly. (laughter) The money goes down, the revenues go down. If we've got that one big name, the orchestras will pay top dollar to get that person and then sell the rest of their season based on that reputation. Orchestras everywhere were buying into this. They would spend a hundred thousand dollars on Itzhak Perlman and sell the rest of the season to the audience as a package. "You can get all of this and this thing for this combined price."
And that worked for years and years. And we know the names, we could go down the list. We know exactly who was being promoted—pianists, violinists, one cello, singers. But it was efficient, and I know people who were held in those management rosters without getting any bookings at all because it kept them out of the way. They weren't competing. They weren't out there trying to get attention in the environment where we were promoting these stars.
The stars are fabulous. It's not a qualitative statement about them. It's just that I feel that that star system of promotion cost us many other voices and careers. It was the metrics—the eighties were the time of the first eruption of MBAs into our economy, and they were changing the way people thought about their jobs, about their business. If you weren't making maximum money, you were stupid.
Lawrence: That's exactly right. And it also created, I hate to say it this way, but I'll use the shorthand and we can unpack it if need be, but it created a new class of money where some of these cultural—these were signifiers of having made it or refinements. So going to the symphony and being able to recognize Yo-Yo Ma was probably a helpful thing for some of these people who were sort of cultural day tripping.
Dorothy: Exactly. Oh gosh, I won't be able to remember their name. There was a big advertising firm that broke in in the eighties and changed the way everybody promoted things by lifestyle, just what you're saying. One of the first big successes was Ralph Lauren. They didn't advertise so much the pieces, the individual garments—it was the lifestyle. Look at how these people live and look at the clothing they're wearing.
Lawrence: Yeah, I heard an interview on another podcast the other day and the guest said the marketing is the product.
Dorothy: There you go. Yeah. (laughter)
Dorothy: When we began, that original foursome, we didn't have a full calendar. We had done a couple of events, and we loved it, and we started telling composers, "Hey, we're doing this thing." We wanted to do this. We got invitations here and there, but we weren't making a living at it.
So on top of just staying busy and doing other things, we started having meetings. We were discussing the identity thing—who do we want to play? How do we want to operate around this? Among other things, we got some coaching from a theater director, Gideon Shine, who was fascinated by the group, loved music and performance and theater altogether, but started just giving us really experienced advice about running a company.
What are the factors that make your life richer or more difficult? And one of the things that we developed with him was this sort of manifesto of who we wanted to be. It wasn't only music. We had lots of other experiences with other performance art forms. And we wanted to embed that in our thinking, our statements about ourselves, that we could do anything we wanted to. Everybody in the group could bring their ambitions into the center and we'd all deal with it. It wouldn't be only music.
You can see, we've done several shows that are really much more multimedia through design. It's a different journey for sure. But that made it possible for us to imagine getting older, going through life changes, seeing things happen and incorporating them, actually working with them.
And the current membership—of course, we now have like four generations in the group. I'm the oldest, I've always been the oldest. Ralph, my other co-founding member is the next, then we have the two violinists. And so we've got me in my sixties, my colleague in his fifties, and then the violinists, one in his forties, one in his thirties.
The worldviews are so different and so interesting, and we do have to spend time visiting and talking and reacquainting ourselves with each other, just as life continues to give us new challenges, new thoughts, new opportunities. I do feel that this membership has—it's now ten years old, the longest ETHEL we've ever had—and I think it is newly mature and can carry statements and musical phrases, musical projects much deeper than we have in the past. We do more styles better, we're patient about the details, we can get even deeper into what makes music unique, what makes a specific piece really special.
Lawrence: Yeah. You know, you mentioned four generations. What jumped out at me when you said that was just the opportunities for repertoire. Like now you've got four generations of people and their knowledge of music and their knowledge of—it's almost, you make, you compensate for each other's interests, blind spots, inclinations. It's just a wide net you get to cast. And then as sort of a corollary to that, it strikes me as what a wonderful opportunity just amongst the four of you for sharing, like somebody bringing a piece of music or you bringing an organizational or life—like it's just that strikes me as a very resilient organizational model, whether you intended to have four people of dramatic age differences or worked out that way, that seems pretty potent.
Dorothy: Yeah, thank you. Well, I would hope as I'm getting older and I'm aware that I will at some point probably choose that the traveling life is no longer what I really want to aspire to, to focus on. That is my wish. My dedication is that this should be an ecosystem that whoever gets to play with this beautiful tool that we've built gets to do their own best work with it. The offering, the product will continue to reflect the specific talents and worldviews of the group of the moment.
Lawrence: Could you tell me a little bit about—I don't know if you'd call it a residency, but the time you spend at the balcony bar performing. Something I'm very curious about that is it strikes me as particularly intimate if I could say it that way, but I'm curious about what do you get from that as performers, as an ensemble, other than the ability to sort of, I guess, play with some regularity, but how does it shape you, how does it impact you?
Dorothy: It has been priceless. We've had this residency—I mean, just for whoever might be in New York, we have an appearance every—there is music at the Metropolitan Museum every single weekend all year round on Friday and Saturday nights during their late opening hours. And it's always in the—there's a cafe or a bar on the balcony right over the main entrance doors. You can hear it when you walk into the museum, there's music happening and it's right over your head.
We program it, actually, and we play it as often personally as we can, as often as we can all be there. But we also book in other great artists who do their own music and it's loads of fun.
Lawrence: That's phenomenal.
Dorothy: It's great, yeah. And a huge insight on the part of the museum that this was going to be an art moment, an art space, not just background music. So it's more like a cabaret, really. And we get to talk to people. So socially, it's been invaluable. We've actually made dear, dear—I'm sure for the rest of our lives—friends that we've watched each other growing older for ten years now, and we just adore each other.
That's one of the things for musicians that I think it's hard to imagine, but our product, our art form has to be sat with. You need people to spend time with you because you can't imagine a piece of music. Just there it is, like by the title, there you go, like "Persist"—nobody knows what that means. But if you can get people to sit with you, spend time, get familiar with your vibe, talk to you for a minute, there's a different level of connection and infection that happens.
You know, it's like you really get more of the sense and we get to stay in touch with what our audience is really talking about, what they're interested in, what their concerns in life are. We've tried programs there that we were just building music that we needed to really learn. And we've been able to try it out, get good at it at the museum and then take it to the concert halls.
That's just this sheer time on the bandstand that makes a gigantic difference to a performer. I like to remember that the Beatles had a residency at a club in Berlin for like two years before they broke in, and they really just slammed it. They just fine-tuned their sound, their material. When they hit the big time, they actually were ready to just do it. Just play, play, play. So we have been as grateful for that as for any other opportunity in our lives.
Lawrence: What is the home-baked commissioning program? I guess I would call it where the quartet is focusing on early career composers or new composers. What do you look for in a composer or in a piece? Like how—what is the thing that helps drive a decision? To the extent you're comfortable doing it, could you talk a little bit about the decision-making process? Like, you know, it's an even number ensemble. Do you get two votes or how does that happen?
Dorothy: Oh, that's great. That's so—oh my God, you're so wise. It's true. That is something we've run up against, like, "Oh, we've got—we can have a dead tie." Yeah, that's hard.
Lawrence: You call Ron Carter. (laughter)
Dorothy: I could think of worse people to call, frankly. What we do in that rare eventuality is we have long conversations about things. We actually just reach an agreement. We just say, "Ah, there's this, there's this or this," and it may take time. People just need to be fully expressed about things that they're concerned or worried about, or just don't feel related to.
In the case of this commissioning project, we did a number grading system on the applications, because the composers submitted biographies and work samples. From their samples, we got some picture of their style, their perspective, the way they approach it. And we just numbered our choices and tabulated the numbers. So the numbers could be more nuanced than just straight yes or no. It was one to five or something like that. And then we just take the top few and talk about them, and decide.
Well, you know, it's never perfect and we never want anyone to imagine that we think of this as a value system. It's not grading. We're not grading anybody.
Lawrence: It's a decision matrix.
Dorothy: Yeah, and all it is, is our agreeing on what music we want to play. It's not about how good a composition is. In fact, we many times over the years, we've received applications supported by materials that were just very, very classical, and we just said, "It's just not our range. It's not what we do. It's not what we're good at." And so we actually feel fairly confident about a lot of that process and it's because it's only based on what we enjoy doing.
Lawrence: Something that I love very much about the state of creative music and that I think ETHEL manifests is that notion of almost like post-genre or pan-genre. You could say it lots of different ways, the blending of uptown and downtown, or however you want to view it.
My sort of era in New York, and we all have our New Yorks, mine was very much influenced by sort of the downtown, The Knitting Factory and all the different John Zorn projects. So he's another one that, of course, you know, he could be—we could be talking about a hardcore project, or we could be talking about a string quartet, or a chamber guitar suite. It's just such a beautiful, limitless conception of what music is.
A lot of the artists I speak with here are working within those same sort of spiritual realms. They may know about these artists a lot, or they may not at all, but they're blending electroacoustic music now, or jazz and electronic instrumentation, just so many different worlds now, and people are not self-conscious about it.
Dorothy: Well, yes. I agree completely. I mean, I love your description. I think you're absolutely right. And I get joy in all of that. Following on my argument that I believe the big hurdle around the millennium was largely economic, that the restraints—I lived with it and I do believe that there were restraints on the system that said, "No, no, no. If we allow too many voices, if we allow too many colors, if we let these reprobates over here who are writing jazz and rock-based music, if we let them in, there won't be as much for the rest of us." The highest, most affluent people would get less.
So we were, like I say, I feel ETHEL was among that early wave, that first wave that just breached the wall, and that's really what was our opportunity. Then the wave was gone, the wave passed and it became normal. I do think that since 2000, the media has wildly expanded. And it really was something that had to happen. It wasn't not going to happen. There was just a lot of resistance to it before the millennium. And then that just kind of evaporated.
And of course we do work quite substantially with people of other cultures. We want to be that agent of connection of communication, understanding each other better. We focused more and more on that particular activity. And we do travel and meet people in their home environments and we ask them to please let us experience a little bit about what music is in their lives.
And it's very unusual in the world—it's very unusual for people to locate music as a practice for experts and pay experts to do it. From almost all cultures, it's just something you do yourself. It's something you do at home. It's something you keep a guitar in the corner. It's not an expertise, it's a birthright and a necessary practice. It's something that people do to stay sane and be able to communicate their love and their sadness and just heal each other's share things. We've embraced that idea of the applied art, something that you actually just use because it's good for you.
Dorothy Lawson
Cellist
A founding member of ETHEL, Dorothy Lawson (Artistic Director, Cello) has performed with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, the White Oak Dance Project, Philharmonia Virtuosi, Ron Carter Nonet, the American Symphony Orchestra, the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and numerous new music ensembles. Canadian-born, she completed degrees at the University of Toronto, the Vienna Academy and earned MM and DMA degrees from The Juilliard School. She teaches in the Preparatory Division of Mannes College at the New School in New York City.
