Stephen Jaffe, the Mary and James H. Semans Professor of Composition, concurs. "When our faculty has a composer struggling with string writing, we can send her right across the hall to ask how a passage fits for the viola or the cello," he says. "These kinds of experiences are irreplaceable."

Antony John, of Bournemouth, England, now in his final year of the Ph.D. program in composition, says that if a graduate student writes a piece for string quartet, it's virtually guaranteed that it will be performed and recorded. "We use those recordings to apply for competitions and job applications for university posts," he says. "To have performances that polished by a group that good reflects very well on us. Whenever I go to conferences or speak to composers elsewhere, the first thing they notice is that the best performance I have [of my recorded work] is a string quartet."

On this evening in Reynolds Auditorium, the Ciompi goes on to introduce a world premiere: a quartet they have commissioned from Malcolm Peyton, co-chair of the composition faculty at the New England Conservatory of Music. It begins with a lyrical soliloquy in the second violin, so heartbreakingly plangent that it gives rise to the speculation the composer must have been in love with a second violinist. The playing continues flawlessly, the piece reminiscent of the work of American composer Roger Sessions.

"Remaking the canon doesn't mean abandoning wonderfully rich traditions of interpretation," explains Jaffe. "It means adding to them. You don't stop studying Biblical literature or Chaucer because popular attention is more focused on sitcoms. In a department of music, it is appropriate to devote attention to the canon-however it shifts-but also to investigate new kinds of music."

The quartet has commissioned pieces from several Duke graduate students as well as established composers. Last year, with subsidies from the Duke Institute of the Arts and the Aaron Copland Fund for Music, they helped make a CD devoted to works of Mark Kuss Ph.D. '95, who has written two quartets with the Ciompi in mind. The CD includes his American Triptych for string quartet and tape. Raimi recalls its most striking movement, "Let's Get a Taco." "The tape was a violent monologue by Harvey Keitel from the Quentin Tarantino movie Reservoir Dogs. Mark used the monologue-the rhythms, accents, and pitch of the voice-as a melodic basis for the quartet. We accompany it, we comment on it. It was a fascinating and, I thought, a brilliant thing. Mark is commenting very strongly about the viability of Western classical music today in relation to pop culture. This was beautiful music with a social script."

At each of this and last season's four Duke concerts, they introduced or will introduce a new work, often a premiere they've commissioned. "I always tell the composers there have to be good cello solos," says cellist Raimi, mischievously.

Having studied at the famed Juilliard School of Music in New York and with Pablo Casals and other teachers, Raimi has spent the last twenty-seven years at Duke. Like all the members of the Ciompi String Quartet, he holds the position of associate professor of the practice in the department of music-responsible for studio teaching as a half-time gig. "Classical music is not dead at all," he says, "but there are many other things that have come to life at the same time. We're a reputable, established string quartet, and if we don't promote new music, who will?"

Music department professor and chair R. Larry Todd points out that the Ciompi's enthusiasm for new music fits into a well-established tradition. "Take Haydn, who is often thought to embody the classical. He was very mindful of the popular music of his day, often drawing on folk melodies and rhythms. We think of a minuet as a court dance for aristocrats: Haydn would begin his minuets in a courtly style, but not infrequently in the trio [the second section of a minuet] he would use popular music with rustic rhythms. There's been an unfortunate delineation between highbrow and lowbrow. The reality is that the lines were not always distinct."

"The Ciompi don't put bags over their heads and play things that sound like whales giving birth," says Hartman. "Their audience trusts them, and I think it is incumbent on performers who can afford to do it-and the Ciompi can afford to do it-to bring new music to the scene and teach the rest of us how to listen to it."

"Symphonic music draws audiences more easily because of its big scope," says second violinist Hsaio-Mei Ku, who relinquished her position as associate concertmaster with the North Carolina Symphony in 1990 to join Duke's faculty. "But chamber music is like poetry-a poem that has few words. We live in the twenty-first century and we want to speak the poetry of today."

Why, though, would professional musicians of the highest caliber want to live and work so far outside the locus for the arts that a major metropolitan area would provide? "I came to Duke because I wanted to play in a quartet," says Bagg, who is also director of undergraduate studies for the music department. "Quartets have a much more difficult time surviving if they don't have a real appointment that grounds and supports them. Every quartet reaches a point in its career where it has to get some kind of attachment to an institution; even the most famous have a residency. It's just too difficult to make your careers only from traveling and performing concerts.

"A chamber-music audience has to be cultivated and educated. It takes time-maybe ten years-and then you have a good audience who have learned enough to know what to listen for. When I got here in '86, the audience was already very cultivated. That was one of the reasons I really wanted to come."

Pritchard puts it more simply: "My favorite thing about being at Duke is that Duke wants to have me here."

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