Spend even a few minutes with violinist Annie Fullard, and it won’t be long before you’ll hear her informal mantra: chamber music is life.
“Playing chamber music informs the way you connect with people, the way you listen—more deeply, more receptively, more responsively, in every way— because you are so attuned to your fellow musicians in a group that you carry that out into the world,” explains Fullard, who joined Peabody in fall 2024 as Director and Sidney M. Friedberg Chair of Chamber Music. “I believe that that capacity to connect through the language of music, to listen actively and respond, creates empathy.”
Fullard is a founding member of the award-winning Cavani String Quartet and also serves at Mercer University as the Charles and Mary Jean Yates Chair in Chamber Music at the Robert McDuffie Center for Strings. Her long history of chamber music performance, education, and advocacy complements her passionate devotion to teaching. “As a performer, giving of yourself and connecting with your audience involves communicating with your colleagues and being inspired by them as well,” she says. “As a teacher, I encourage each student to find their own voice to express the music in the most meaningful way.”
Growing up, Fullard was eager to play violin duets with her mother, a violist. It was the only way her parents could get her to practice, she says. Mother and daughter began performing for local organizations. They even performed on a farm. “I remember going to some barn somewhere and the horses were sticking their heads out the window and I thought this was the greatest,” Fullard recalls. “I thought, ‘If I can play for horses, sign me up.’”
As a teenager, she attended summer music festivals, found other people her age who were similarly smitten with playing instruments, and fell in love with the chamber music repertoire. “I was so moved by the music and how it made me feel to play with other people,” she says.
Later, as a student at the Eastman School of Music, Fullard bonded with the founding members of the Cavani Quartet—“my sisters,” she calls them affectionately—while playing Mendelssohn’s Quartet Opus 13 in A minor; a black-and-white poster of the quartet’s 1984 Carnegie Hall debut hangs in Fullard’s office. She says she often assigns the same piece to young ensembles “because it’s kind of a fall-in-love-with-chamber-music piece,” she says. “I love teaching it and sharing it and watching a group have the same reaction.”
Playing in a string quartet for more than 40 years has given Fullard deep insight and a rich portfolio of techniques that foster collaboration among players in chamber ensembles. She and her Cavani Quartet colleagues have presented a workshop chock full of collaborative strategies and applied principles at universities, conservatories, and even business schools. A collection of these techniques—ranging from chamber music aerobics to expressive counting to improv—appears in the recently published The Art of Collaboration: Chamber Music Rehearsal Techniques & Teambuilding (Oxford University Press), co-written with leadership scholar and consultant Dorianne Cotter-Lockard.
Fullard is effusive about her new role at Peabody and describes herself as wanting to be a catalyst for both students and faculty. “I want to cook up some craziness here,” she says, referencing her self-professed love of all things silly. “I want us to think out of the box and see what we could do to work together.
“A small group of people through a creative alliance can inspire a larger worldview that honors humanity, the expression of diverse perspectives, and the generation of love through music,” Fullard continues. “And Peabody is the perfect laboratory for this joyful work.”