Lydian String Quartet to be Removed from Brandeis University Faculty

The quartet, which has been a core part of the Brandeis music faculty since 1980, will not receive a contract renewal

Members of the administrative staff at Brandeis University have taken the decision not to renew the contracts of the Lydian String Quartet, in an effort to save money. The quartet has served continuously at Brandeis for the last 44 years, and its players are core members of the music department's faculty.

At a faculty meeting, Dean of Arts and Sciences Jeffrey Shoulson explained that 25 contracts were up for renewal this year, and that it was difficult to determine where necessary savings could be made without causing substantial damage to undergraduate offerings.

According to Shoulson, eliminating the quartet's contracts creates "savings of around $275,000 a year annually, and in order to reach that savings we would have to eliminate two to three OTS positions in some of the other programs."

In a verbal response at the meeting, Prof. Yu-Hui Chang, Head of the Music Department, argued that the quartet accounts for 33% of music staff if you count the numbers of individual people, and that therefore the music department is "disproportionately shouldering the school’s financial burden when the upper administrators' goal was to reduce the faculty by 8% campus-wide."

Currently comprising Julia Glenn and Clara Lyon (violins), Mark Berger (viola), and Joshua Gordon (cello), the Lydian Quartet have performed all over the United States. Lyon, who has received a GRAMMY nomination on three occasions, was appointed to the group just one month ago.

"I have to publicly question the wisdom of this kind of decision making," Prof. Chang said at the meeting. "[I feel] like this administration has greatly underestimated the value of the music department and what the department has done for Brandeis."

"We are also a very public facing department," she continued. "So what we do is be seen by hundreds and thousands of people. Stop making decisions that damage our reputation."

"This is not to mention all the other losses we’ve had to deal with, including the freeze of our doctoral programs, and the loss of our concert production staff that we desperately need to function," Prof. Chang added in a separate statement to The Justice. "At this moment the department still doesn’t know how we can handle the aftermath of this cut, as the Lydian is an integral part of our department’s programs and much more."

The Violin Channel reached out to Brandeis University's music department and has yet to receive a response.