They called themselves the Ante Arte quartet, and in the early 1970s, during their student days in the Bay Area, they played, and played.

It didn’t seem to matter where, or who was listening. Streetcorners, weddings, receptions—they weren’t fussy.

It all began at a chamber music class at the University of California-Berkeley. David Pearl was a freshman and played the cello. Gary Chanan, a newly arrived doctoral candidate in physics, played the violin.

“We really got along,” David said.

In a way, their love of chamber music exemplifies what C.S. Lewis said of friendship: “Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: “What! You too?”

The Ante Arte quartet grew out of that class, which led to the street sessions in downtown San Francisco.

“There were buskers, as they called them, in Sproul Plaza in Berkeley, playing for spare change,” Gary said. Then the group’s first violinist, Nels, had an inspiration: “The real money to be had was in the financial district in San Francisco,” Gary said.

Two or three times a week, the four of them would load their instruments, chairs and stands into a 1940 Packard ambulance that Nels owned. Off they would go, rumbling across the Bay Bridge with Gary at the wheel because Nels did not have a driver’s license.

“One of our favorite places to play was Crocker Plaza,” David said. “We also did well when we played in front of Bank of America headquarters.”

The sessions lasted for two or three hours. An open violin case received donations.

“We’d usually go home with about $25 apiece,” David said. “And that was enough for me to support myself through the summer paying $50 a month rent “

Then there were the gigs. David remembered a party thrown by Francis Ford Coppola.

“He had huge parties in San Francisco,” David said. “They put us in a little corner. People would wander over and they’d give us some wine. We’d have a little circle of people around us.”

They never really knew what to expect. “We played for a wedding on Mount Tamalpais in Marin County, outside on a slant,” David said. “It was sort of awkward.” Then there was the gig on Knob Hill that unexpectedly turned into a performance for 40 people.

But nothing matched the parties thrown by Walter Landor, a prominent industrial designer and pioneer in branding, on his docked ferry that served as his office.

“Everybody who was anybody went to those parties,” David said.

They were a big enough deal to be written up by Herb Caen, the longtime columnist for The San Francisco Chronicle:

Eine Kleine Night Music: Nobody gives great parties around here any longer. Nobody, I mean, except Walter Landor, the industrial designer, aboard his fabulous ferryboat, the Klamath, at Pier 5.  …

Thursday night, Walter had his usual weird, wild and wonderful cross-section aboard the ferryboat, swaying with the tide. On the poop deck, a quartet of street musicians pooped away at their baroque chores (no proper S.F. party is complete without street musicians these nights).

Gary suspects that the street musicians Caen kept seeing was always the Ante Arte quartet.

Eventually, these happy days would give way to new chapters for David and Gary.

David pursued a career in public finance and would settle in Washington, D.C. as a senior executive in a federal housing agency. He maintains an apartment in New York City.

Gary got married, had children and spent much of his career as a physics professor and eventually department chair at the University of California-Irvine, moving there after a stint teaching at Columbia University. Both are retired now.

They overlapped in New York in the 1980s, when David was at First Boston and Gary was at Columbia. They formed another quartet, joined by a Columbia University Russian literature professor on viola and a violin-playing attorney who still lives in New York. The group lasted several years, until Gary got his position at UC-Irvine.

There was one extended quiet period. For 38 years, during Gary’s time at UC-Irvine, they played only once even though they remained in touch.

But a few years ago, Gary retired and moved back to New York with his wife, Mindy.

“Out of the blue I get this email,” David said. It was from Gary, who found David through the ACMP directory. “I was flabbergasted.”

Today, David and Gary are playing again, usually at David’s apartment. Gary switched to viola in 2001. They have even reconnected with the violinist from their 1980s group.

But it all goes back to that chamber music class at Berkeley. Gary remembers their first assignment: the Debussy string quartet, which has some notoriously difficult passages. Today, David and Gary are revisiting some of their favorites from back in the day—Haydn, Beethoven, Mozart. But the Debussy awaits. “I’d love to play that again,” Gary said.