By ANDREW BULBROOK

It was the Calder Quartet's first summer at the Aspen Festival's Advanced Quartet Studies program, and I had the number for Christopher Rouse, the festival's composer-in-residence, scrawled on a scrap of paper in my hand. As I anxiously dialed his number I had good reason to be nervous. While the Juilliard community may be most aware of his recent centennial commission, Friandises, he is also a winner of a Pulitzer Prize (1993) and a Grammy Award (2002), and his works have been premiered by artists such as Cho-Liang Lin, Emanuel Ax, Sharon Isbin, Yo-Yo Ma, Evelyn Glennie, Joseph Alessi, Carol Wincenc, and Dawn Upshaw, as well as major orchestras across the United States. His string chamber music has been commissioned by ensembles like the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and the Cleveland Quartet. I made that call in the summer of 2002 because we were interested in programming his music, but I didn't realize it would start a friendship that has been the source of immeasurable artistic and personal growth for us. We will perform Rouse's First String Quartet in Alice Tully Hall on November 28, and we are thrilled that our friendship and commitment to understanding his musical voice has culminated in the Calder Quartet being chosen to premiere his Third String Quartet in 2009, his first in more than 20 years.

Above: Calder Quartet members (left to right) Eric Byers, Jonathan Moerschel, Benjamin Jacobson, and Andrew Bulbrook. Below: Composer and Juilliard faculty member Christopher Rouse. (Photo by Jeffrey Herman)

As we spoke on the phone that day, Rouse told me about his two quartets. The First Quartet, ferociously hopped up, might necessitate the use of tranquilizers and was probably not a good place to start. It was 17 minutes of pure rage, tempered only by an epilogue where he reflects on the 1981 assassination of Anwar El-Sadat. The Second Quartet, a 1988 tribute to the people of the Soviet Union, was a better introduction. The first movement, slow with intense ostinatos and jagged cut-offs, was straightforward, but the second movement was unlike anything we had ever seen. It demanded a whole new sound from us—percussive, violent attacks and recklessly fast tempos that were the embodiment of what might be called the Rouse mantra, "fast is good; loud is better." Just as the darkness becomes overpowering, Rouse creates a catharsis in the final movement through the juxtaposition of extreme violence and extreme beauty.

This visceral music from the 1980s appealed to us immediately; the more we studied and learned from Chris, the more we realized this was no accident. The range of emotions in his quartets came from a time and place in his life that we were just entering. Like Rouse himself, we were young men committed to a rewarding but challenging art form. We struggled with money, women, current events, and avoiding the pitfalls of youth in Los Angeles. While I spent the '80s sleeping on Transformer sheets and playing 8-bit Nintendo, a young Chris Rouse was processing his own coming of age as an artist and citizen.

Our work with Rouse deeply influenced the way we thought about all music. In our early work on the pieces, questions would be answered with the instruction to do exactly what was on the page. Later, things got more complicated. I remember a time when we played a section of the Second Quartet for Chris exactly as marked in the score. He stopped us, said it was too fast, and coached us into a tempo that was roughly two-thirds of the printed speed. The music finally hit with its full emotional impact. Satisfied, we penciled the new tempo into our parts, but the printed scores remain unchanged. You can't help but think differently about Beethoven after an experience like this.

Rouse also shared his favorite pieces of music with us and we tried to do the same. He helped us develop the idea of pairing his quartets with the late quartets of Shostakovich, which we will do at our upcoming Alice Tully Hall concert, and told us to study works like William Schuman's Fourth Quartet, the Bruckner Quintet, and the entire catalogue of Varèse. Once, I tried to share a particularly dark track by Tupac Shakur called "Hellrazor" that I felt was an expression of enraged despair comparable to Rouse's First Quartet. I knew Chris had been influenced by Led Zeppelin and thought I could point him in a new direction—but my efforts were fruitless.

Calder Quartet Lisa Arnhold Memorial Recital Alice Tully Hall Tuesday, Nov. 28, 8 p.m. Free tickets available Nov. 14 in the Juilliard Box Office. Please see the Calendar of Events for more information.

We were thrilled when Aspen invited us to perform all of Rouse's chamber music in a single evening during their 2004 season. The adrenaline peaked minutes before the show, and pacing in the wings with my colleagues, we listened to Chris express to the entire hall how grateful he was for our work during his introduction to the evening's program. It was an incredibly moving experience to realize what this exploration of his past meant to him. The nerves cleared and we took the stage with an entirely different mindset.

The following year we were excited to be accepted into Juilliard, and the first congratulatory e-mail we received was from Chris. We knew that our Alice Tully concerts would be a great opportunity to showcase his amazing music, and so last year we performed his Second Quartet. It was great to finally bump into Chris in the hallways of school for impromptu discussions and to see him at more of our performances. For the first few years of our relationship we thought it strange that he had not ventured to write any other quartets for some 20 years. Finally, we gathered up the courage to formally ask him to write another quartet—and to our great joy, he said yes. We have learned so much working with Chris and it's incredible to think that our desire to understand him contributed to his return to composing for the string quartet. We eagerly look forward to the next chapter of our musical journey together.

Violinist Andrew Bulbrook is a member of the Calder Quartet, Juilliard's graduate string-quartet-in-residence.