The Nashville Symphony String Quartet’s Revolutionary Mission

By Laurence Vittes | From the May/June 2025 issue of Strings

The Nashville Symphony String Quartet emerged in 1963, one year before the Civil Rights Act was signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson. It was a period of dramatic change in classical music and civil rights across the South. Just a few years earlier, in 1961, the Cleveland Orchestra had faced down segregationists in Birmingham, Alabama, when conductor George Szell refused to perform without cellist Donald White, the first Black musician in a “Big Five” orchestra.

The Nashville Symphony had already taken its own stand when conductor Willis Page began hiring musicians regardless of race in 1960. When executive director Peter Pastreich was first offered the job in 1962, he told the symphony that he was unwilling to work in a place that practiced racial segregation. He was assured, “Nashville’s way beyond that. That’s not an issue,” he recalls. And so, building on the foundation set by Page’s principles, Pastreich conceived of the racially integrated Nashville Symphony String Quartet in 1963 as both an artistic and educational initiative.

For first violinist and concertmaster, Pastreich recruited Kenneth Goldsmith, a student of Mischa Mischakoff and William Kroll who had joined the Detroit Symphony at age 19 and won two major competitions in New York. In Nashville, Goldsmith would combine his symphony and quartet duties with session work for country stars like Chet Atkins and Merle Haggard. Booker T. Rowe, a Black violinist from Philadelphia who had recently completed his undergraduate studies at Temple University, was recruited to serve as second violin. Pamela Brand would play viola, and (in the quartet’s second year) cellist Harvey Wolfe joined them, following a stint with the Houston Symphony under Leopold Stokowski. Thus, the Nashville Symphony String Quartet was formed, the first integrated string quartet in the South, performing in white, Black, and newly integrated schools across Nashville during a pivotal time in the city’s history.

“Peter believed that if we could reach all of the elementary children through quartet concerts at their schools, we could sell out the symphony season and educate our audience,” Goldsmith wrote in his notes. The ambitious program had the quartet performing two different concerts in each of Davidson County’s 125 elementary schools—one program for grades 1–3 and another for grades 4–6.

The Nashville Symphony String Quartet played an astounding 250 school concerts each year for two years. During the first season, children were encouraged to draw pictures of the ensemble. “It is interesting to note,” Goldsmith wrote, “that they often noticed that one of us was Black, but often the wrong one!”

In the first year, the quartet’s ambitious repertoire introduced students to Haydn, Beethoven, and Mario Davidovsky (“for the sound effects”). Goldsmith also included demonstrations of “good ol’ country fiddling,’” and by October of the ensemble’s first season, the symphony season was indeed sold out.

The quartet also established two concert series: the 468 Series at Vanderbilt University’s small hall (named for its seat count) and another at Cheekwood Art Museum. Programming was adventurous—at one Cheekwood concert, the ensemble paired Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge with Berg’s Opus 3 String Quartet and discovered, according to Goldsmith’s notes, that “the audience was very shocked with the Beethoven, but quite accepting of the Berg!”

Wolfe recalls finding immediate chemistry with his new colleagues. “Ken Goldsmith was a brilliant violinist and a very strong leader. He was a lively personality, very much a go-getter. We got along very well,” Wolfe says. “We played hundreds of these programs, including challenging works like Bartók’s Second String Quartet.” 

The Nashville Tennessean was impressed. “Today no city can expect to be taken seriously unless it has a symphony orchestra,” it printed in an op-ed, “but a string quartet is still far from being a required status symbol. Nashville did more than it had to and did it well.”

Sixty years later, Peter Pastreich still remembers the Nashville Symphony String Quartet as a project that deeply impacted both him and the city. Having first met Goldsmith during his days managing the Greenwich Village Symphony, Pastreich would find himself leading transformative changes in Nashville, where he was confronted by an orchestra that was largely volunteer based. “About a little more than a third of the musicians were being paid. The others were all volunteers,” he says. He navigated complex union politics in the right-to-work state while pushing for progress, including desegregation of the concert hall.

“People were incredibly nice to deal with, and we made enormous progress,” Pastreich recalls. He worked to diversify the orchestra, notably hiring Rowe as principal second violin. But while the board accepted Rowe in the orchestra, Pastreich says, “They were more resistant to his presence in the quartet.” One board member told him that having one Black musician in the orchestra wasn’t really a problem, but having one out of four in the string quartet was “a much more serious matter,” Pastreich recalls. Under his leadership, the orchestra continued to evolve, including the formation of a Nashville Symphony Chorus—a full half of its members were African American.

Though personal tensions ultimately led to the quartet’s dissolution, its impact on Nashville’s classical music scene was lasting. Each day, they brought chamber music directly to children who had never experienced it before, while their concert series elevated the city’s cultural offerings significantly.

After the ensemble disbanded, the members went on to distinguished careers: Goldsmith pursued graduate studies at Stanford before founding the acclaimed Mirecourt Trio, with cellist Terry King and pianist John Jensen, and later taught at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music. Rowe became the first Black musician to play with the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1968 and became its longest-serving member. Wolfe was recruited by George Szell for the Cleveland Orchestra, where he played for 37 years. Brand continued her career as a respected violist and teacher.

Though its tenure was perhaps short lived, the impact on its members endured. At the beginning of 2024, Rowe wrote to Pastreich: “I ran across your email as I was going through one of my old notebooks. I’m sorry it took me this long to tell you that both your managerial support and your personal kindnesses left an indelibly positive impression on me during my memberships from 1963 to 1965 with the Nashville Symphony and the Nashville Symphony String Quartet.”

Its influence also lives on in the work of future generations taught by its members. Matthew Detrick, for example, was a student of Goldsmith at Rice University and, in 2008, cofounded the Apollo Chamber Players. The ensemble’s vision is “to create cultural harmony through musical exploration,” according to its website. “We are,” it says, “bold, multicultural, innovative, collaborative, inclusive.” Apollo is also community focused, partnering with “schools and universities, at-risk youth centers, refugee and veterans service organizations, and public libraries.”

For Detrick, Goldsmith’s influence went beyond technique. “Six years of violin study with Ken cultivated in me a curiosity to explore and to push musical boundaries while maintaining performance excellence,” he says. “He spoke fondly of his time in Nashville, where he ‘cut his teeth’ early on in his career.”

Just as the Nashville Symphony String Quartet broke new ground in the 1960s, bringing chamber music to segregated schools while pushing artistic boundaries, today’s ensembles like Apollo continue that tradition of musical innovation and community engagement. They may not make humans like Goldsmith any longer, as Detrick says, but his vision of chamber music as a force for both artistic excellence and social change lives on.