The Old Steeple and Eureka Chamber Music Series enter into a first-time collaboration, bringing the 2024 Avery Fisher Career Grant winning Balourdet Quartet to Ferndale for an immersive presentation combining live music and a panel discussion about freedom, history, and the role of art in society.

In our increasingly fractured and polarized society, the arts are one of the few activities that can help to bridge the divide and bring us together. Music has an uncanny way of celebrating our differences while illuminating our common humanity. The Balourdet Quartet and ECMS artistic director Tom Stone will present musical selections and a discussion of music in the context of the historical events that inspire and shape it.

The centerpiece of the evening will be a performance of the groundbreaking and Grammy Award winning “Different Trains” by American composer Steve Reich, which combines live musical performance with pre-recorded sound, inspired by two very different sorts of World War II era train trips, one in America and and one in Europe during the holocaust.