Spine Tinglers: Edwin Outwater
This week’s contributor to the Spine Tingler Series is the young American conductor Edwin Outwater. Edwin is currently the music director of the Kitchener Waterloo Symphony. One year in, a lot of good things have been happening and it seems that community support is stronger than ever. Considering the highly publicized, almost terminally divisive rough patch that preceded his appointment, this is no small feat. More on this in a future post. Right now, it’s over to Edwin:
“I was in high school in Los Angeles, driving around in an old beat-up Volvo with my friends, catching as many concerts as possible. On one sunny SoCal day, I heard the Emerson String Quartet playing Beethoven’s quartet Op. 132 at a large church right in the middle of Beverly Hills. I had no idea what I was about to hear.
Inside, the church was dark and cool, the altar bare. When the quartet began the slow “Heiliger Dankgesang” movement, they played without vibrato. You could almost see the sound moving through the air. The church embraced the sound as it would beautiful chant.
It was a perfect moment, and for me, opened the door to Beethoven’s late style. Looking back, I think I was taken in by the contrasts: big church, small quartet; intimacy and privacy; prayer and exultation; the personal and the universal. I felt shattered and reborn right then and there. This music showed me a larger world than the one I knew.
The Emersons ended their concert with Op. 130 and the Große Fuge. The light seemed blinding as I walked out of the church in to the SoCal sun. Beethoven had helped me find something I was looking for, something that I couldn’t describe. After that, I knew music was my life.
- Emerson String Quartet playing Beethoven's quartet Op. 132 at a large church right in the middle of Beverly Hills. I had no idea what I was about to hear." title="LinkedIn">
