Coming from four different parts of the country – Mark from Oberlin and Seattle, Andy from Buffalo, John from South Bend, and Norman from Plymouth, Michigan – each Concord had been playing the quartet repertoire with family, friends, and colleagues for many years, but none of them knew all three others.
They enrolled in a summer program for nascent string quartets at SUNY, Binghamton, where they met for the first time and began rehearsing with an awkward discord (one of them had been practicing the wrong music).
Their intensive summer in Binghamton was broken only by their first introduction to Dartmouth in August – a two-week rehearsing residency funded by the Friends of Hopkins Center which culminated with an informal "thank you" performance in Rollins Chapel.
Throughout that period the quartet consolidated its reputation as champions of contemporary American music, while exploring both the well-trodden paths and the odd byways of the standard repertoire.
One of the earliest works written in the then-revolutionary "collage" technique that has since been dubbed "Neo-Romantic," the Rochberg quartet, and the Concord's performances and recording of it, landed them smack in the middle of an international musical controversy that continued through a seven-work association with that composer.
In the ensuing years, the Concords not only enriched the College's and the community's musical lives immensely, but continued to amass an enviable national and international reputation, buoyed by well-received recordings of both the standard and the non-standard repertoire.
In addition to their Beethoven, Bartok, and Schubert celebrations, other significant Dartmouth performances have included a concert of new works by faculty members Jon Appleton, Lauren Levey, and Christian Wolff, a performance with their "Godfather," Robert Mann, of some of his own music, a continuing series devoted to Mozart quartets and quintets, and concerts with celebrated guest artists including Gervase de Peyer, Richard Goode, Claude Monteux, Gilbert Kalish, Leslie Guinn, Menahem Pressler, Bernard Greenhouse, and Walter Trampler.