EUREKA PROGRAM

Midori &
Friends

Thinking of Home: Sounds, Images, and Feelings — teaching students how music carries culture and experience.

PARTNERSHIP

Midori and Friends Foundation

FORMAT

Virtual Workshops & Performances

Program Overview

In partnership with the Midori and Friends Foundation — launched in 1992 by world-renowned violinist Midori — Eureka Ensemble teaches students about music's ability to communicate different cultural experiences through listening and discussion.

Students explore creating a sense of home through sound, the ways one can portray personal experience, how composers evoke characters and customs, and understanding home as a diverse space — through listening activities, breakout discussions, and projects built from musical elements.

Virtual Workshops

Five Workshops

Workshop One

Portraying Your Personal Experience

Students think about how music reflects their own experiences, and discover how composers do the same in the music they write.

Listening

Price · A minor Quartet
Villa-Lobos · “Brazilian” Quartet

Workshop two

Evoking Characters and Customs

Some composers defy what we expect from strings. Students see live how the unusual sounds of Leyendas are made, and how they transport us to the Andean world.

Listening

Gabriela Lena Frank · Leyendas

Workshop Three

Traditional Sounds Through Composition

What is “traditional” music, and why study it? Students learn how composers used their home countries’ traditions to create modern pieces for new audiences.

Listening

Béla Bartók
Toru Takemitsu

Workshop FOUR

Home as Diversity

What sounds come to mind when you think of home? Of America? Students share their own while exploring a composer who wove many ideas of home into one piece.

Listening

Jessie Montgomery

Workshop FIVE

Your Experience Through Sound

The finale: the class composes a piece together, deciding how each musical element plays a part — and Eureka musicians bring it to life.

Virtual Performances

Thinking of Home

Chamber works influenced by the sounds and songs of home — a composer's childhood, culture, or country.

Eureka Ensemble presents pieces that feature sounds of South America, Eastern Asia, Eastern Europe, and the United States.

Featured Composers

Florence Price, Gabriela Lena Frank, and Béla Bartók, among others.