Spivey Hall located on the campus of Clayton State University in Morrow, Georgia, has a long history of excellence when it comes to concerts and musical performances. The Hall itself is a beautiful building, centering around an Albert Schweitzer pipe organ, hand built in Italy.
Throughout the course of the pandemic, Spivey Hall has had to reimagine the shape of its 2020-2021 season, focusing on providing patrons with a wealth of digital content. The latest event to be offered virtually is a screening of the documentary film “Strings Attached: On the Road with the Dover Quartet.”
The film follows the history of the Dover Quartet, from their early days as college students to their formation and performances that launched them into international fame. The documentary takes a look at the musician’s professional and personal relationships to one another, and the impact their friendship has had on the success of the group.
The film will be screened by Spivey Hall Friday at 7:30 p.m. followed by Q&A with director Bruce Broder and Dover Quartet cellist Camden Shaw.
Spivey Hall executive and artistic director Sam Dixon joined “City Lights” Host Lois Reitzes to talk about Spivey’s season and the film.
Interview Highlights:
Sam on what is so special about the film:
“I think this film, which is directed by Bruce Broder, is an amazing testament to the fact that musicians have to create their professional lives. And there’s no single way to do this. No matter what genre of music in which you’re trying to make a career as a musician, you have to find your own way. And this is a really beautiful and extremely well-produced experience of watching these four incredibly talented musicians create their careers together. They met as students at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, they could have each have had a solo career, but they instead decided to form this group called the Dover Quartet.”
On seeing the Dover Quartet first play at Spivey Hall:
“The audience was rapturous. Afterwards, we had one of the strongest first impressions of a string quartet that I can remember in some 15 years of being at Spivey Hall. Then they came back to us, I generally don’t reengage a quartet in consecutive seasons. But the impact and the musical rewards were both so great that they came back the following season…And that was one of the most exhilarating experiences of my life at Spivey Hall. They came on fully charged, they came on full blown, and yet there was this tremendous humanity to their playing. And that’s something I love; there was energy; it was alert. It had life; it had purpose. They were as one, but the individual personalities of the musicians shone through in the most wonderfully expressive ways. They are not about themselves. They’re serious musicians they are about music making. “
