Every Thursday night at seven-thirty, four people who are not musicians sit down in a dentist's living room and play string quartets. We have been doing this since the fall of 1996. None of us is paid, none of us is any good in the sense the word is used in concert halls, and none of us would miss it for anything short of a hospital stay, which has in fact happened once (Denise; appendix; she was back in three weeks and we played Haydn in her honor).

This page exists because people keep asking how you do this, and because when I went looking for a page like it in 1996 there wasn't one. It is also, I admit, a place to keep score.

The quartet, in score order:

Ages: we range from 41 (Denise) to 58 (Ruth). Instruments: nothing anyone would insure for much; Marianne's violin was her grandmother's, mine came from a shop in 1994, Denise's viola is a rental she has now paid for four times over, and Ruth's cello is the only genuinely good instrument in the room and she knows it.

Haydn, Quartet in C major, Op. 76 No. 3, the "Emperor." This is the mountain. We began the first movement in January 1998 and are still on it, in the sense that a person who has climbed a mountain is still on it if they haven't come down. The second movement is the famous one: a slow hymn tune Haydn wrote for the Austrian emperor (the same tune Germany later took for its national anthem) followed by four variations, and in each variation a different instrument gets the tune while the others decorate. The second violin gets it first, in Variation 1, with the first violin playing a running line above. Then the cello, then the viola, then the first violin at the end. It is the most democratic ten minutes in the repertoire, and it is why I say second violin is the best seat. Every one of us has a turn to be the melody, and we can all play it now without anyone crying, which we could not say in 1998. The third movement (the minuet) is fine. The fourth movement starts in C minor with three loud chords and is the reason we have not yet played this piece in public.

Mozart, Quartet in G major, K. 387. The first of the six quartets Mozart dedicated to Haydn. We play the first movement and the minuet and we do not talk about the finale, which is a fugue and a half. We chose it because Ruth had the parts. This is how most amateur repertoire gets chosen.

Beethoven, Quartet in C minor, Op. 18 No. 4. The early Beethoven, from his first set of six. The first movement is stormy and forgiving: the storm covers a lot. We took it up this spring because after eighteen months of Haydn we wanted to play something loud. The third movement has a scherzo that goes faster than any of us can play it and we play it anyway, at a tempo Marianne calls "brave."

Also on the stands: the Pachelbel Canon (for weddings and because people ask), a book of Christmas carols arranged for quartet, some Corelli that is easier than it sounds, and a folder of things we tried and set aside, including a Dvořák we will return to when we are better and a Shostakovich we will return to when we are different people.

Parts come from the music store downtown, from a mail-order catalog, and from the public library, which has a surprising collection; Ruth also has a shelf of yellowing editions from her college years, with fingerings by someone who was better than any of us.

Thursday, 7:30 to 9:30, Ruth's living room. Coffee at 7:30, tuning at 7:40 (see the intonation problem), playing by 7:45 if nobody has had a week. Two hours, one ten-minute break, and we stop on time because Denise sometimes goes to the hospital afterward and Marianne has fourth graders at eight in the morning.

1. Tune to Ruth's A. Then to each other. Then again. Ten minutes, minimum, and worth every one.
2. Play something we know, start to finish, no stopping, to get the fingers warm and remember what it feels like to be an ensemble. Usually the Haydn slow movement.
3. Work. One passage, one problem, ten or twenty bars at a time. Marianne runs it, because someone has to and the first violin is traditionally the one. We play it slowly. We play it in pairs: first and second violins alone, then viola and cello alone, then inner voices (second and viola; Denise and I are the inner voices and we have a bond) so that everyone hears what everyone else is doing. We play it with the metronome, which nobody likes. Then we play it at tempo and it falls apart in a different place and we do that place.
4. Break. Ruth's husband's cookies. Gossip, dental advice, and once, memorably, a splinter removed from my thumb by a licensed professional at no charge.
5. Play through whatever we've worked on, all the way, no stopping even when it goes wrong, especially when it goes wrong. You learn to keep going. Nobody stops the concert because the second violin lost his place.
6. Write down where we are in the notebook (mine; that's the secretary's job and it fell to me). Next week's bar numbers. Who is going to practice what. Whether anyone lied last week about practicing.

Rules we've arrived at the hard way: the first violin is the leader and the leader is not the boss; you may say "I think that was rushed" but not "you rushed"; everyone gets to be wrong about a tempo; and when three people say the fourth is sharp, the fourth is sharp, however it feels from the inside.

Practice at home: we each aim for four sessions a week of half an hour. We each get about two. Nobody checks. Everyone can tell.

Here is the thing nobody tells you when you take up a string instrument as an adult: there are no frets. The note is where your finger is, and your finger is wherever it is. A pianist presses a key and gets a note; we press a string and get a guess. Now multiply by four.

The trouble is not that any one of us plays out of tune (though we do). The trouble is that we play out of tune differently. A quartet has to agree, note by note, on where the notes are. When Ruth plays a low C and Marianne plays an E two octaves above it and the E is a little high, the chord is sour, and it is sour in a way that a listener can hear even if they can't say why. Haydn's slow movement is a hymn: it is nothing but chords. There is no hiding.

What we've learned, slowly:

• Tune carefully and tune to the cello. Ruth's A, then everyone's A to hers, then each instrument's other strings in fifths, then check the open strings against each other across the group. Ten minutes. If this step is sloppy, the whole evening is sloppy.
• Listen down. The cello is the floor. If the top voices tune to the bottom, the chords ring. If everyone tunes to the first violin, they fight. This took us a year.
• Thirds are the enemy. The third of a chord (the E in a C chord) wants to be played a hair lower than you'd think for the chord to sound sweet. Denise and I get most of the thirds, in the inner voices. We have a private signal for "that one's mine and I know."
• Play the passage as chords. Stop the music on a chord and hold it. Adjust until it stops beating. Then move to the next chord and hold that. Then play the passage. It is tedious and it is the single most useful thing we do.
• Leading tones lean. A note that is about to resolve up a half-step wants to be a little high, so it "leans" into the next note. Marianne can do this on purpose. The rest of us do it by accident, both directions.
• Vibrato hides nothing. We tried. It just makes the sour note wobble.
• An electronic tuner is useful for the open strings and useless for the rest, because in a quartet the "right" pitch for a note depends on the chord it's sitting in. The tuner says one thing and your ears say another, and in a quartet, your ears win.

We are better than we were. The Haydn slow movement, some Thursdays, rings like a bell for whole phrases at a stretch, and when that happens nobody says anything, we just look up, and then Ruth's husband coughs in the kitchen and it's gone. That sound is why we do this. Every quartet in the world, amateur and professional, is chasing that same sound; the professionals just catch it more often.

Our annual public appearance. Marianne's church has a candlelight service in December, and for the last two years they have let us play for the twenty minutes before it starts while people find their seats and take off their coats. This is, we agree, the ideal audience: they are not there to hear us, they are talking, small children are being unwrapped from snowsuits, and if we play well a few heads turn and if we play badly nobody knows.

The program for this December, as of last Thursday's vote: the Haydn slow movement (the hymn; it is nearly a carol anyway), four carols from the book (one of which has a viola solo, at Denise's insistence and to her regret), the Corelli, and, if the fourth movement comes together by then, which it will not, the whole Haydn. If it does not, the Pachelbel, which we can play in our sleep and, at the end of a two-hour rehearsal, have.

Last year's report: we were good. Not good for amateurs; good. The Haydn rang. A woman in the third pew stopped talking. Afterward the pastor said it was lovely and asked if we would play for a wedding in the spring, and we did, and that was less good (the bride was late, we ran out of music, and I now know the Pachelbel Canon has no natural stopping place). But the December one was the best twenty minutes we've had, and we have twelve Thursdays to be better than it.

If you played an instrument once and have been thinking about it, here is everything we know.

1. Find the people first, not the music. Community orchestras, church orchestras, the bulletin board at the music store, your kids' string teacher (who knows every adult amateur in town), a note in the church newsletter. Say "amateur," say "for fun," say "no auditions," and mean it. We found Ruth through Marianne's dentist appointment. Ask everyone.
2. You need a cellist. They are the rarest and the most important. If you find one, be very, very nice to her.
3. You need a violist, and you probably won't find one, so one of your violinists will have to become one. Rent a viola. It's a fifth lower, the middle line of the staff is middle C instead of B, and the notes are further apart. Six months of grumbling and then it takes. Denise says the viola is the instrument she was always meant to play, but she says it in a tone.
4. Pick a night and never move it. Same night, same place, same time, every week. The group that says "let's see when everyone's free" plays twice and dies.
5. Start with Haydn. He wrote sixty-odd quartets, he wrote them for amateurs as much as professionals, every part is interesting, and the early ones are playable by anyone who can hold a bow. Mozart's easy ones are not easy. Beethoven's early ones are possible. Anything after that, wait a few years.
6. Buy the parts, not just a score. Get a decent edition with good page turns; a bad page turn in a fast movement is worse than a wrong note. The library and the used bins are your friends.
7. Tune for as long as it takes. See above. Seriously.
8. Get a metronome and use it every week and hate it.
9. Play through, don't stop. Every rehearsal, at least once, play the whole thing without stopping, however bad. Stopping is a habit and it is the wrong one.
10. Book a gig. A church, a nursing home, a friend's party, the library. A date on the calendar is worth six months of "we'll get to it."
11. Coffee. Cookies. A spouse who makes them and leaves.
12. Lower your standards and raise your effort. You will never play this music as it deserves. Neither will anyone. Haydn wrote it so that four friends could sit in a room on a Thursday and try, and that is, it turns out, enough.

• The Amateur Cellist — Helen took up the cello at fifty-two. Ruth says she has the right idea and the wrong instrument (there's only room for one cellist in Ruth's living room).
• Piano Tuning Explained — Eugene Alves's page on how a piano gets tuned. He has it easier than we do; his notes stay where he puts them.
• Opera for Beginners — Gerald F., retired music teacher. Marianne's kind of person.
• Ballroom at Sixty — the Castellanos took up dancing at sixty, which puts our taking up Haydn at forty-something in perspective.
• Carter Piano Studio — where Marianne sends her fourth graders.