In 2012 the Pro Arte Quartet celebrated its centennial with a series of concerts at its home institution of the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Midway through The Pro Arte Quartet: A Century of Musical Adventures on Two Continents, John W. Barker uses a famous anecdote to explain how a Belgian string quartet formed in 1912 might continue to exist 100 years later in Wisconsin:

Like Washington's axe, string quartets evolve over time, but none has changed so much or endured for so long as the Pro Arte Quartet. While the group's centennial is the book's raison d'être, even a lesser anniversary would have warranted an investigation into this quartet's remarkable history.

As a study of the string quartet as an ensemble rather than a genre, Barker's book is one of few of its kind. More prevalent studies of soloists, conductors, orchestras, and opera houses can all play a valuable role in providing alternatives to composer-centric models of music history. Such studies can demonstrate, furthermore, how the heterogeneity of twentieth-century music shaped and was shaped by cultures of performance. But the study of string quartets provides a unique opportunity to investigate the nature of musical collaboration on a person-to-person level. Perhaps for this reason, many books about string quartets consist primarily of interviews and testimonials. Two books on the Guarneri Quartet fit this description, as does Robert Spruytenburg's recent study of the LaSalle Quartet, a group that mirrors the Pro Arte in its transatlantic origins and championing of twentieth-century music.Footnote ¹ Another example of this kind of writing – a conversation between members of an imagined string quartet in Elisabeth Le Guin's groundbreaking Boccherini's Body – is fictional, but no less insightful for it.Footnote ² Though Barker takes a more conventional approach to writing history, he too draws on interviews as a means of supplementing his rich archival sources.

Given how infrequently studies such as Barker's appear, it comes as no surprise that his book fills a gap in scholarship on the Pro Arte Quartet. Barker acknowledges two precursors in the preface (x–xi). Yet each of these studies is chronologically circumscribed: Martha Blum provides an abbreviated history of the Pro Arte's first fifty years (1912–62), while Anne Van Malderen gives a more comprehensive treatment to the quartet's time in Belgium (1912–47).Footnote ³ Van Malderen's work is in French, making Barker's book not only the first study to consider the entirety of the Pro Arte's history, but also the most substantial scholarly study of the quartet in English.

Following the preface and the introduction (‘Quartet Contexts’), which consists of a ‘cursory digest’ of professional string quartets (4), the book's central chapters are divided according to the five first violinists who have led the Pro Arte (the long tenures of Alphonse Onnou and Norman Paulu get two chapters each). Each chapter follows the same format, with Barker first relaying the events of a given period then detailing the quartet's repertoire and recording activities during the same period. The advantage of this format is clear: readers can use the book as a reference work, dipping in and out to access information relevant to the era they are studying. The two comprehensive indices, one of which is devoted exclusively to composers, contribute to this functionality. Yet the latter sections of each chapter sometimes take on the quality of a laundry list – a problem that Barker acknowledges (xii) – and seem increasingly obligatory with each passing chapter. While Barker is right to insist on a detail-oriented approach, a more flexible structure might have allowed some of the book's most captivating topics (as in Chapters 3–4, described later) to come to the fore.Footnote ⁴

Chapters 1–2 focus on the quartet's founding members and the twenty-eight years they spent performing in their native Belgium as the Quatuor Pro Arte. In the first chapter, Barker introduces one of the book's recurrent themes: the quartet's promotion of new music. The Pro Arte collaborated with well-known composers such as Milhaud and Stravinsky and also premiered many works by contemporary Belgian composers, to whom they felt ‘an obligation’ (26). Chapter 1 also includes a discussion of the group's relationship with the prominent American patroness Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge. With this topic, as well as details of the Pro Arte's tours to the United States, Barker contributes to a growing body of scholarship on transatlantic music culture in the twentieth century.Footnote ⁵

The second chapter opens with memorable descriptions of each of the quartet's founding members: Alphonse Onnou was a chain smoker, Laurent Halleux's playing possessed ‘a silvery elegance’, Germain Prévost loved practical jokes, and Robert Maas had ‘a poetic bent’ (34–6). Barker demonstrates a flair and skill for these character portraits and for vignettes describing the many mishaps the Pro Arte overcame in the course of its history. Later in Chapter 2, for example, he describes a 1931 recording session gone wrong at London's Abbey Road studios:

This chapter also addresses the Pro Arte's first contact with the University of Wisconsin–Madison (55). When news that Germany had invaded Belgium reached the quartet during a concert at the university in May 1940, plans for a residency were accelerated, thereby accomplishing the first step in the Pro Arte's transformation into an American ensemble.

Chapter 3, which covers the short tenure (1940–4) of first violinist Antonio Brosa, picks up where the previous chapter left off in investigating the Pro Arte's shifting musical and national identities during and immediately following the Second World War. For the first time, the quartet replaced one of its founding members, and with a foreigner at that (Brosa was Spanish). The three remaining Belgians, furthermore, had been forced to emigrate to the United States. For these reasons, many previous commentators have marked 1940 as the end of the Pro Arte Quartet, deeming the group's American continuation ‘spurious or irrelevant’ (82). As Barker reveals, the Pro Arte almost did end in the early 1940s. There were passionate debates over whether it was appropriate to continue using the Pro Arte name following Onnou's death. With personnel turning over more rapidly in the years to come, Halleux and Prévost came to view their new, non-Belgian colleagues as ‘outsiders’ (91); that their families remained trapped in occupied Belgium did not help matters. This kind of identity crisis was not unique to the Pro Arte in this period. Robert Spruytenburg, for example, begins his recent book by asking ‘[w]as the LaSalle Quartet an American quartet?’Footnote ⁶ The LaSalle was founded in the United States but consisted primarily of German musicians, whose experiences of displacement were later documented by first violinist Walter Levin.Footnote ⁷ Neither was the Pro Arte's means of survival, a quartet-in-residence contract at the University of Wisconsin–Madison (84), a singular phenomenon. Though the first of its kind, the Pro Arte's residency was soon followed by the LaSalle's residency at Colorado College, and it is just one of many examples of the ways in which American universities benefitted from the contributions of immigrants and refugees in the wake of the Second World War; as Martin Jay puts it, ‘[n]o student of the forced migration from Germany to the United States during the Nazi era can fail to be impressed by the extent of its impact on the cultural life of the country to which its members fled’.Footnote ⁸ However familiar the Pro Arte's history during these years may seem, though, Barker makes a convincing case for revisiting it. In his telling, the period appears as a critical inflection point in the life of the quartet. Barker probes the group's response to the death of its leader, investigates how an institution moves forward in a new place and with new members, and documents experiences of dislocation and emigration. The result is an insightful and moving chapter, the book's best.

The fourth chapter considers the Pro Arte's twenty-three years under the leadership of Rudolf Kolisch. Of particular interest is Kolisch's approach to musical leadership, which was influenced by his work with Schoenberg and other members of the Second Viennese School. Kolisch's ‘penchant for constant analysis’ in rehearsal caused friction with the other Pro Arte players (147).Footnote ⁹ His insistence on playing from full scores likewise grated on the nerves of his quartet-mates, who found his proclivity for turning rehearsals into ‘exercises in joint study’ tedious (150). This tension resulted in Kolisch ceasing to perform with the Pro Arte Quartet while maintaining his faculty position at the university, an awkward arrangement that ultimately led to Kolisch's departure from Madison a few years later.

Kolisch was both the Pro Arte's last European leader and its last European member. Thus Chapters 5–6, which cover the tenure of Norman Paulu, also represent the Pro Arte's final step towards becoming a wholly American ensemble. This development boded well for the longevity of the quartet, which became more entrenched than ever at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. But stability in Madison resulted in a diminished prominence on national and international stages (214). Perhaps unavoidably, then, these chapters (like Chapter 7, which covers the current incarnation of the quartet under violinist David Perry) are less stimulating than the four that precede them.

In the book's conclusion (‘Retrospect and Prospects’), Barker reflects on the Pro Arte's endurance and the challenges it might face in the future. Here, as throughout the book, Barker's affection for and investment in the Pro Arte is clear. While there is no shame in that, there are several moments at which greater distance between Barker and his historical subjects might have been warranted. In the book's early chapters, for example, Barker repeatedly refers to Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge as ‘Mrs. Coolidge’. If this nomenclature was common during Coolidge's lifetime, it now reads as oddly gendered in comparison to the unadorned last names used to refer to the male quartet members. In Chapter 4, additionally, Barker reproduces a letter written by Prévost but fails to comment on the apparently anti-Semitic remark contained within it (118). This tendency to write from the quartet's perspective without critiquing that perspective is especially evident in the book's final pages. Barker bemoans the Pro Arte's diminished status at the University of Wisconsin–Madison: ‘the idea, once vividly promoted, that the provision of a residence for the quartet was one of the great cultural achievements of the university, seems pale and thinning nowadays’ (245). Though he correctly points to budget cuts as a factor in this change in circumstances, Barker does not question the assumption that the Pro Arte should be central to the university's cultural life. He thus misses an opportunity to consider what the role of a quartet-in-residence might be in the Pro Arte's second century, at a time when many university music departments seek to diversify their offerings beyond the European traditions that the quartet represents.

Following the conclusion come five appendices. The first two, which read like miniature essays, are among the most engaging sections of the book. In the first, Barker attempts to clarify the murky circumstances surrounding the Pro Arte's recording of the Mozart Clarinet Quintet with Benny Goodman in 1936. The second is a description of two works of fiction inspired by the quartet, including a synopsis of David Milofsky's 1981 novel Playing from Memory. The final three appendices are more strictly informational, detailing the Pro Arte's Contemporary Music Project (1984–6), their commissions, dedications, and premieres, and their discography.

While the latter appendices comprise a valuable repository of information, they also point to one of the book's central problems. Barker claims to write for ‘both a specialized and general readership’ (xi), and his clear, jargon-free prose should indeed be accessible to most readers. Yet scholars may find it difficult to make use of this book. In contrast to the detailed information found in the appendices, the rest of the book contains not a single citation, only a list of primary sources in the preface and a two-page ‘selected bibliography’. Even extended block quotations are presented with neither footnote nor endnote. Barker explains this choice in the preface:

The challenges of disorganized archival materials will be familiar to many, but that only makes it more disappointing that the ‘minimal identification within the text’ is rarely sufficient to track down sources without additional legwork. As a result, the book's utility for scholars interested in the Pro Arte or the many composers, musicians, and institutions with whom the quartet collaborated is severely limited.

In spite of this issue and others described above, The Pro Arte Quartet: A Century of Musical Adventures on Two Continents has much to contribute to the discourse surrounding one of the twentieth century's essential ensembles. Scholars wishing to delve further into the Pro Arte's history would be advised to consult the primary sources directly and/or the secondary sources cited above. But Barker's book is a good starting point, providing an engaging overview for researchers and non-specialists alike. If Barker's treatment of the Pro Arte occasionally trends towards hagiography, furthermore, the genuine warmth with which he recounts the quartet's history mostly makes up for it. In this way the book serves as a reminder to approach our historical subjects not only with suspicion and discernment, but also with care and generosity. These latter qualities are perhaps especially crucial when, as in the case of the Pro Arte Quartet, the history of music is so closely bound up with the history of individual lives.