Transmission

Hello, my name is Juliette Salmona, I am a cellist and I am going to tell you about the Zaïde Quartet, of which I am a member.

We trained at the CNSM in Paris in 2009, and very quickly won many prizes in most international competitions for string quartets, which allowed us to launch our career.

We studied at the ECMA (European Chamber Music Academy) then in Vienna to receive advice for several years from Hatto Beyerle of the Alban Berg Quartet and Johannes Meissl of the Artis Quartet. With them, we acquired a solid base of expertise, rhetoric, and knowledge of articulations in all the founding composers
– of the string quartet, Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven in particular.

The arrival in 2014 of Leslie Boulin Raulet, our second violin, and then of Charlotte MACLET, our first violin in 2017, brought a new source of inspiration to the Zaide Quartet. Having studied and worked for many years with Gabor Takacs, Gyorgy Kurtag and Andreas Keller, our two violinists came with their knowledge of the Hungarian approach and its great violin and quartet tradition. Two very complementary approaches that have nourished the sound and approach of the Zaide Quartet.

I would like to talk to you about string quartet as a school of life.

String quartet is a very special discipline which creates a real organisation of micro society. It is a form of alchemy which is different from other ensembles whose work is less exclusive.

We are lucky to have deep respect for each other.

In Quatuor Zaide, the creative process is not left to the brilliant and dictatorial vision of a designated conductor (traditionally the 1st violin). This old model is sadly still very present nowadays. It is for us an illustration of what damages relationships, wether in a quartet or in a society. It is an outdated system that no longer has its place in the world that we want to build. Our mission at this level (which has a direct effect on the sound and on the interpretation) is to constantly work on our ego, building respect and consideration. It is the creation of a healthy micro society where everyone finds its rightful place within the group, and the rightful place of the group within the music world. It is our mission to become the better musicians and human beings we can.

We, in the Zaïde quartet, pay particular and permanent attention to the body to the way we use it when we play, when we create, when we rehearse.

We all have along the way had physical and emotional problems related to practicing and learning our instrument. So the question “How to be a healthy, fulfilled musician?” quickly emerged as a central point of our research.

Charlotte and I trained in Qi Gong and meditation with great masters for over 15 years. These practices are now well integrated into the way we make music and we teach them in parallel as well.

In the same spirit, the 4 of us have developed these keys to consciousness as well as tools that we use in our creative work, in the creation of new sounds, in the way of communicating.

Our own teaching aims to develop awareness of the body, respect for the physical, mental and emotional space of the musician. We can also work on tension prevention and post-traumatic repair.

All these incredible tools are essential, we want to share them to encourage new generations of musicians to flourish and create with joy!

One specificity of the Zaide quartet is of course the fact that we are four women. We are very happy to see that more and more young women are embracing the career of quartet and that there are now a few all-female groups, which was not the case when we started. That being said, there are still very few female groups to manage both an international career and a family life at the same time. In the Zaide quartet we are all mothers.

I am not going to dwell on a teaching that mostly advised us against following this career if we wanted to have a family, not to mention the number of teachers who told us “it’s a shame that you are women, you will have to stop when you have children” or the comments from spectators like “oh that’s wonderful, your husbands let you do that?” I think there has been in the last few years an awakening of the need to change mentalities.

But what is more disconcerting is the number of phone calls we receive from young professional women, sometimes already having a great career, who ask us concrete questions: “is it possible to have children and be a quartet player?” “how do we organize ourselves?” “can i do it?”

This shows that there is really a lack of information, adequate structure, and more generally awareness around the needs of women performers.

This observation is obviously directly linked to the awareness of the place of women more generally in society and it invites several avenues of reflection and debate.

With the Zaide Quartet, we are regularly invited to conferences or meetings around these subjects like recently at the CNSMD in Paris.

We can talk on a philosophical and sociological level about the needs of the female musician, or can talk in a very concrete way about organizational details in travel, in concerts, in dressing rooms, etc.

Details that are absolutely NEVER discussed and that create enormous stress for young mothers in concert. Words like breast pump, having a private place for breastfeeding and the need for necessary breastfeeding time during rehearsals, the necessary support of professional or colleagues in periods of great fatigue linked to menstruation, pregnancy, miscarriages, life with young children, all these elements are still taboos that are nevertheless the daily life of female musicians.

It is our mission to talk about all this, to raise awareness to put an end to the discomfort, hardness and loneliness that many women suffer from and to enable a better adaptation of our musical world to these needs that have been ignored for too long.