Meet Alice Hong | Violinist of Edgewood String Quartet

We had the good fortune of connecting with Alice Hong and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Alice, is your business focused on helping the community? If so, how?

Edgewood String Quartet is the first of its kind in Georgia: a classical quartet that performs music from all genres in and outside of classical music halls. Our members consist of Adelaide Federici (violin), Josiah Coe (viola), Joyce Yang (cello), and myself. We started as the musicians of Fever’s Candlelight Concerts in Atlanta, and we’ve since begun branching out to various other spaces that have never had a string quartet perform inside of them. It’s a LOT of fun, and we’re also able to provide a space where audiences new to classical performances can enjoy their first experience without worrying about “rules.” At our concerts, you can clap whenever you’re excited about something, you can cheer during the fast stuff, and you can come up and talk to us after. You can even bring a drink to sip on during, COVID-protocols permitting. Providing audiences with this kind of classical experience gives more people a chance to fall in love with classical music and classical instruments. Hopefully that means that we’re helping keep classical music exciting, and more audience members will show up at the symphony, the opera, or the ballet.

We are also hoping to launch a series of immersive concerts, using projections and cool spaces as well as collaborations with other artists. Atlanta has only just begun to explore this kind of boundary-defying creative experience, and we’re excited to pioneer a whole new way of experiencing music here.

Alright, so let’s move onto what keeps you busy professionally?

Classical music is serious in Atlanta: for example, the Atlanta Symphony can be found on a lot of “Top 10 Orchestras in the World” rankings. Singers from the Met perform for the Atlanta Opera. The Ballet is top notch. It’s amazing to be a part of a city with such incredible artists, but there are some statistics we can’t ignore. The majority of a classical audience had a number of years of classical training themselves. 37% of classical audiences are ages 61 and up, with only 7% being under 31. And let’s face it: classical music can be intimidating. Besides some written concert notes that you can’t read during the performance because it’s often too dark, there’s usually minimal interaction between the artists and the audience: an implied understanding that if you’re here, you must know this music already.

For Edgewood String Quartet concerts, we put connecting with our audiences as one of our top priorities. Classical music always comes with interesting context or backstory, and we let the audience in on the joke before we perform the piece for them. We also don’t shy away from performing modern day non-classical songs: in fact, we’re planning to record an album of original covers this spring!

We began performing together as a group in September of 2020, when Candlelight Concerts first came to America from Europe. We hadn’t performed since March 2020 because of the pandemic, and it was nerve-wracking, surreal, and incredible to be performing again. We all knew each other before from playing with the Atlanta Symphony, Atlanta Opera, and Atlanta Ballet, but this was the first time we came together as a quartet. We had such a great time playing together, and the audiences were so grateful and supportive. We also learned a lot about the meaning of music and performing, because for the first time in our lives, we could really get to know our audience members and hear their feedback. We realized how big of a difference it made to talk to the audience throughout the concert. We realized how grateful the audience was to be there. We saw how effective the candlelight ambience was.

It got us thinking. As classically trained musicians, we’ve followed rules all our lives. Now, in these kinds of concerts, we were allowed to break them too! We could play music besides classical music. We can talk to our audience. We can have applause between movements. We can play in spaces that weren’t made just for classical concerts. We can dream way beyond what we’ve known all of our lives. We want to create a whole new classical concert experience, and we are so excited to start this journey in Atlanta.

We are developing immersive concert ideas with venues now and in the process of securing funding for them. If anyone reads this and has any venue suggestions, please feel free to shoot them our way! We also have a Patreon site where we’ll be sharing our journey and the development of our projects there.

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
I’d take them straightaway to Buttermilk Kitchen. That is a Southern staple I can’t get enough of. A walk down the Beltline to check out Ponce City Market and Krog Street Market would be fun too, and then Korean BBQ at 678 in Duluth would be the perfect way to end the day. Georgia Aquarium and Coca-Cola world are also a must, and of course I’d try to get them into a Candlelight Concert where we would be performing that night!

Who else deserves some credit and recognition?
We have to shout it out to the amazing Deidre Scott, who was the Candlelight Concert producer when we began performing Candlelight Concerts. She has given us so much support from day 1, taken the time to listen to our ideas, hyped us up beyond our own imaginations, and helped us make some of our concert visions into reality. She really helped set the tone that anything is possible. Deidre, you are truly the best!

Website: https://www.edgewoodstringquartet.com

Instagram: @edgewoodstringquartet

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/edgewoodstringquartet

Other: Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/edgewoodstringquartet

Image Credits
Jolie Loren Photography