Yings Bring Fun Dynamic to Crowds

Though the Ying Quartet, the world’s only professional family string quartet, has been playing together for 11 years, the energy of their performance last Friday at Houghton Library shows they don’t have to worry about aging just yet.

Their performance of works by Mozart and Bartok moved some audience members to tears.

The good-natured ribbing and stage chemistry between the players reveals the familiarity of brothers and sisters. The Yings—Timothy, David, Philip and Janet—have quite a history together and fondly recall the days when their mother took them to their weekly lessons in a crowded Pacer, which David swears is “now known as one of the worst cars ever made.”

As a school teacher, their mother believed that music was part of a complete education. So as children, they say they never sensed their family’s vested interest in music was unusual, but rather assumed that “this is how all families are.”

But the Rochester-based Yings have since learned that not all families are so immersed in music, so they have made it their goal to bring the often-overlooked classical music genre to the community. College students are a big part of the community they aim to reach.

By serving as artists-in-residence on college campuses including Northwestern University, the University of Iowa and Harvard, the Yings carved a unique niche for themselves that enables them to reach student audiences that “are really open to music.” Timothy, in particular, is excited that the group has the power to dispel students’ misconceptions of classical music as being reserved exclusively for “weddings and church.”

But the Yings have set their sights on reaching a community wider than just college students. They say the variety of meanings that music can have for different audiences keeps their career interesting.

While prestigious concert hall performances give them pride as artists, the Yings say they gain a different, deeper satisfaction from playing for terminal cancer patients in hospitals when the audience is more “free to cry.”

But Phillip says both types of performances are equally important to the group.

“We feel like our musical lives are not complete without the whole range and the willingness to find ways that music can reach all different people in all sorts of situations,” he said.

To further expose people to classical music, which the Yings admit can “seem separate from society,” the quartet sponsors LifeMusic, a project that commissions pieces from relatively unknown composers with “a distinctively American” sound that any audience can relate to. David cites that these “musical experiments” and collaborative efforts—including an unusual collaboration with Phish—have helped the quartet sustain the magic during their career.

The Yings have also kept a fresh group dynamic that allows them to feed off one another’s enthusiasm. Their chemistry is so inspiring that, according to Timothy, several psychologists have come knocking on their door, proposing that the Yings be the subjects of their studies.

“But we’ve always turned them down, because we don’t want to know [why we work well together]… We don’t want to mess things up,” he said.

Indeed, the mystery of the Ying quartet’s family dynamics is part of what attracts audiences to their concerts. “I know [it] is part of the experience of hearing us perform…And I think that should be a part of the concert-going experience,” he added.