STRINGS ATTACHED
On the road with the Dover Quartet.

Strings Attached, a documentary, delves into the lives, on and off stage, of four superb musicians who give up the prospect of solo careers to form The Dover Quartet.  We are with them when they ‘break through,’ winning the most prestigious international string quartet competition, and are suddenly in demand around the world.  They achieve success and realize their dreams…but what does it mean?  Will the endless days and nights on the road, the cheap hotels, the slim pay and the internal conflicts overwhelm their love of the music?  Or will the music win?

Message from the Director

Though I could barely carry a tune, I was always a music guy.  I listened to the radio incessantly and had songs playing in my head every waking hour. I played in bands in high school and college.  Then my son found his way into the music world and I became a music dad.

One of his closest friendships, starting at age 10, was with Milena, one of my subjects in Strings Attached. She and her family, the Pajaro van de Stadts, lived a few doors down from us.  One night we were all together and Milena, age 12, got the idea to fill all the wine glasses with water to varying levels and then play tunes by rubbing the rims. Even then, the pitch was perfect, and she was able to take requests.  That’s the year she also won the Jacksonville Symphony Concerto Competition, competing against musicians in their twenties.

I kept up with Milena’s career ever since, and when the Dover Quartet formed, I became close with Joel and Bryan and Camden as well.  How do four musicians with such jaw-dropping individual talent find each other and how do they each decide to set aside solo careers for the group endeavor of a String Quartet?  What’s it like struggling to break out of the pack of hundreds of string quartets graduating each year?  How is one able to interact so intensely with the same bandmates day after day?  Is it even possible to make a living at this? And maybe most intriguing to me, might the Dover Quartet make this centuries-old music form “cool” again in an era of streaming music of the moment? Can a young group like the Dover Quartet bring new audiences to classical music on the strength of the vitality of their playing?

The Dovers allowed me to travel with them for over a year because they thought those were good questions, ones that they, not coincidentally, were trying to work out for themselves.

— Bruce Broder

BRUCE BRODER
Director

Bruce Broder is a documentary filmmaker living in Washington DC.  His first film, Chops, followed a Florida high school jazz band’s quest to get to New York and compete in the highest-level jazz band competition in the country.  Chops premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York and was distributed by Virgil Films. It won Best Documentary at three Film Festivals and was selected for presentation by the International Documentary Association. In his review of the film, Baltimore Sun critic Michael Sragow wrote:

It's a tribute to Broder's powers of observation and empathy that when the kids, in simple language, explain what it means to swing as one, they do acquire a kind of bardic clout…the effect is overpowering.

Prior to filmmaking, Broder wrote, produced and directed commercials—taking a special interest in music tracks--for advertising agencies in Detroit, Baltimore and Jacksonville, FL. He also headed the creative departments of those agencies and was President of two of them.