Swinging strings

When I interviewed him earlier this week for a Weekly story, cellist Stephen Harrison from Palo Alto's Ives Quartet impressed me with his drive to get string-quartet music to the masses. Especially the masses of a more tender age. (If we could get just one kid to turn down Nickelback on his iPod for one minute, what a lovelier place the world would be.)

So I'd like to do my part by bringing the string quartet to this newfangled invention called a blog. Here's a sample of the Ives Quartet playing William Kroll's "Magyar." It's a 45-second .mp3 file.

The quartet next performs May 11 at St. Mark's church in Palo Alto, taking on a new Roger Bourland composition called "Four Poets."