After her Chapin Hall performance last semester, world-renowned violinist Midori returned to the College on Feb. 8. She stayed for a week to work with student chamber groups and violinists. Working with 30 students, she offered lessons, master classes, and coaching sessions.
Her residency at the College ended on Sunday with a chamber music concert in Chapin Hall. The concert was intended for local middle and high school students and was closed to the public.
“There are many, many things that I learned and took from this experience, and I hope the students [did] too,” she said in an interview with the Record.
Professor of Music Anthony Sheppard appreciated Midori’s commitment to helping students at the College. “She has been incredibly generous with her time at Williams,” he said in an interview with the Record. “From the start, she wanted to work with as many students as possible.”
According to Sheppard, Midori’s residency was in the works for the past two and a half years. While the music department was more than excited to host her, Sheppard emphasized that the planning involved some challenges, particularly because of Midori’s busy schedule. She is currently engaged with several projects and responsibilities, including teaching at music schools such as Juilliard and the Curtis Institute of Music. Midori said that the primary tenet of music is to build a shared experience, and her residency at the College allowed her to do that. “We all felt close to each other through this power of music and this experience of having done something together,” she said.
Midori’s recent work pushes the boundaries of traditional violin repertoire. Her latest project, “Resonances of Spirit,” inspired by African American spirituals, focuses on the violin’s capacity to express pain and sorrow. It incorporates sounds of water, whispers of West African prayer, and humming and singing along with the electronic melody.
For Midori, getting to work with her contemporaries is a crucial element of her work. “I always find it so exciting to work with living composers and to commission new works,” she said. “Different composers have different ways of thinking about music, and different ways of creating sound.”
This engagement with contemporary compositions also influences how Midori engages with more classic pieces. “I feel that the inspiration I get from the work I do with any particular composer influences what I do with other compositions, not just living composers’ works, but also from the traditional canon,” she said.
Midori is also a philanthropist. During her time at the College, she delivered a public lecture about her experience working as a UN Messenger of Peace and as the founder of several non-profit organizations.
Midori & Friends, a New York City-based nonprofit, has been offering tuition-free music education programs to local students for over three decades. “Because [music] was created by people, it belongs to the people, and to share it through music education is something that makes us very human,” Midori said.
Another one of her non-profit organizations, Music Sharing, is based in Japan and brings Western classical music and traditional Japanese music to youth throughout Japan and developing regions in Asia.
According to Midori, by learning to express oneself through music, students can learn their histories, find inspiration, and feel energized. “It’s part of human nature to want to express and to explore the human condition,” she said. “And [that is] not always very easy, but music is a fantastic tool, and I think we all have to get to know it.”