Toward a business history of the string quartet: How the string quartet became a career path in the United States

At their origins, American string quartets achieved a high standard of performance through full-time commitments made financially possible through individual patrons. As the American music scene matured through the twentieth century, the string quartet profession integrated performance and education in both work values and financial support. In the late twentieth-century, a clear quartet “career path” emerged which was supported by a variety of resources from graduate degrees in string quartet, which were created specifically to develop student string quartets into professional ensembles, to competitions and governmental financial support of specific programming. As quartets continued to flourish in the US during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, some groups chose to break from the model and self-sustain as a community-based nonprofit organization outside (or in addition to) educational residencies