Community & Education
The Verona Quartet is strongly dedicated to sharing its passion for music-making with people from all backgrounds, of all ages.
The Quartet also considers it a privilege to educate the future generations of musicians and constantly strives to explore the various meeting points of culture and art.
Community Engagement
One of the Verona Quartet’s earliest projects was a community engagement project with the city of Danville, Illinois, where over the span of two years the Quartet curated a chamber music series and gave outreach performances and masterclasses across elementary, middle and high schools in the city, resulting in an increase in K-12 music class enrollment to almost double the average of the State of Illinois. Experiences like these - and the relationships formed through them - have brought the Quartet to believe that its role as a string quartet is not simply to reach communities, but to be a community of music-lovers into which they welcome others.
The Quartet continues to be an active proponent of community engagement through its work with K-12 students, as well as through performances outside of the concert hall, in venues such as hospitals, elderly homes and various business organizations. Recently, the Quartet was the Ernst Stiefel String Quartet-in-Residence at Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts in Katonah, New York, where they performed and taught at over forty K-12 schools in the region.
Education
The Verona Quartet is the Quartet-in-Residence at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music. In addition to chamber music instruction at the Conservatory, the ensemble’s focus includes lessons and chamber music coaching with students from the College of Arts and Sciences, as well as the curation of the Arts & Sciences Chamber Collective, involving students of the College of Arts & Sciences, Conservatory, and members of the Oberlin community.
The Quartet has also served as the Quartet-in-Residence at the Indiana University Summer String Academy and the ENCORE Chamber Music Institute. For application information for ENCORE, click here.
The Quartet’s other teaching credits include masterclasses and residencies at the University of Southern California’s Thornton School of Music, Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music (Singapore), The Juilliard School, New England Conservatory, Williams College, University of North Carolina School of the Arts, Lunenburg Academy of Music Performance, San Jose State University, Virginia Commonwealth University and the Vancouver Summer Music Institute.
Cross-Cultural + Interdisciplinary Experiences
Photo: Robert Torres
With four members hailing from different parts of the world, the Quartet believes that navigating barriers - cultural or otherwise - through open communication and mutual respect is vital to the health of any organization, institution or community. It is with this mindset that they endeavor to share their music and experiences with others.
The Quartet is also passionate about exploring intersections of various art forms and/or cultures; past collaborations have included concerts with Emirati poets in the United Arab Emirates, performances with virtuoso pipa player Wu Man, dancers from Dance Heginbotham, arts installations with visual artist Ana Prvački, as well as salon-style opera productions with singers from Mise-En-Scène Studios.