BOSTON - The digital tide is lapping at the shores of classical music, and the Borromeo String Quartet has embraced it like no other major chamber music group.

The Borromeo has forsaken paper musical parts in favor of reading the music, often in the composers’ own writing, on MacBooks nestled on special music stands. A projector attached to a laptop beamed the manuscript onto a screen behind them. “It’s an incredible experience, watching the handwriting of Beethoven as it passes by you,” said Nicholas Kitchen, the group’s first violinist.

The group has replaced tuning devices and metronomes with programs on their laptops, and they record all their concerts.

Nor is the Borromeo alone. Operas and concerts are projected live in movie theaters; music has been written for cellphone ringers ; concert audiences are seeing more multimedia presentations; orchestras use text messages to stay in touch with audiences; YouTube videos are used for auditions. Many orchestras now present programs with sophisticated video images.

Longstanding professional quartets are delicate organisms, in which egos must be balanced, personalities meshed and artistic compromises reached. The push for blanket recording and laptop stands caused tensions. At least one of Borromeo’s members felt pressured. But now, they said, the methods have become second nature.

The Borromeo now sells its performances online at its home-made Web store, livingarchive.org.

The quartet began in the late 1980s at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where Mr. Kitchen; Yeesun Kim, the cellist; and the other two original members were students. Mr. Kitchen and Ms. Kim met there at 16, began playing music together and within a year became a couple. (They are now married and have a 7-year-old son.) The other two current members are the violist Mai Motobuchi and the second violinist Kristopher Tong.

In 2002 Mr. Kitchen began preserving every performance he could, educating himself about microphones, digital recorders and video cameras.

“For audience members it means a lot to have that memory of what they enjoyed so much,” said Ms. Kim, 43.

The quartet now has more than 800 concerts in its archive. The group also uses recordings to teach and to prepare for concerts. Before every concert they run through a program and immediately listen to it.

“Along the way you notice hundreds and hundreds of details that you want to fix,” Mr. Kitchen, 44, said. “Then next time you play it, it’s transformed.”

Members of other prominent quartets expressed admiration for the Borromeo’s use of laptop readers but had no immediate plans to follow suit.

“I don’t see us changing,” Eugene Drucker, a violinist of the Emerson String Quartet, said. But, he said, “Probably more and more groups will be doing this as we go along.”

For the Borromeo the use of laptops grew out of a nontechnological impulse. Mr. Kitchen wanted to read his music from a full score - all four lines of the quartet together ? rather than from his individual part. That made the use of printed scores impractical.

So he scanned scores into his laptop, which he put on a portable stand that came with a foot pedal attachable through a USB. He used the system for rehearsing, and one day his colleagues suggested he take it onstage.

Now the members obtain scores from Web sites offering free editions, like imslp.org, PDF files provided by composers who write music with programs like Sibelius, and their own scanning. The players say having the whole score in front of them is an immense help in playing new works. Complicated passages are immediately comprehensible. Seeing the score as they play also deepens understanding of composers’ intentions. The score “is exactly the direct picture they had in their mind,” Ms. Motobuchi, 35, said.

At first Mr. Kitchen had to push for the system. Mr. Tong - at 29, the youngest and newest member - resisted the most. Seeing the music of his colleagues on the page can detract from the magic of chamber-musicmaking, of communicating through hearing, he said. “For a long time I felt that the more I was seeing, the less I was hearing.”

Mr. Kitchen acknowledged that playing from traditional parts had its advantages. At the same time, he said, “as a group we decided that that sense of confidence, of kind of being empowered by this richer information, was something that made our group perform better.”


By DANIEL J. WAKIN