A string quartet from the Juilliard School will perform Thursday for a Sonoma County audience, featuring music with a unique history — it was created by people incarcerated at the Sonoma County Jail.

For 10 weeks, these students created personal pieces that Juilliard’s world-renowned musicians will bring to life.

The course, called “Music for the Future,” is run by the nonprofit Project: Music Heals Us, with help from Five Keys, a charter school offering high school and college courses at inside the prison. The program gives students a creative outlet and a chance to learn the fundamentals of music, a rare opportunity to express themselves in an unexpected place.

The program introduces inmates to live music, teaches them the basics of music, and explores the life and work of Ludwig van Beethoven.

This is the second time the course has been held at the Sonoma County Jail. The first session was with men – and one of them the compositions even went viral on TikTok.

That of Thursday will take place in the women’s module, carried out remotely and broadcast on Zoom to juilliard.zoom.us from 10 a.m.

Anyone with Internet access can watch the two violinists, cellist and violist discuss and perform each piece, said Misti Wood, a spokeswoman for the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office.

Violinist Coco Mi said the quartet will perform five pieces by the students. Participants will not be able to see students due to confidentiality rules.

Mi, the other members of the quartet, along with instructors Ben Grow and Dana Martin, who lead the Music for the Future program, met with the students during a weeklong intensive in late August, offering daily composition lessons musical.

They started the week clapping along to basic rhythms, laughing as Grow illustrated difficult concepts with playful demonstrations, and learning musical terms like quarter notes and half notes. By the end of the week, each of the eight students had completed a short piece that the quartet performed in person.

“They are all very unique. They are all exemplary of the students’ personalities,” Martin said of the three pieces already submitted and workshopped by the quartet.

A song is brief but exciting, with a “rock vibe” and an underlying groove and rhythm. Another is light and playful, running through a range of emotions.

“I found myself smiling while listening to it,” Martin said.

The third track is an opus that begins with a fast pace before switching to “something more fluid, more languorous and emotional,” she says.

The other two pieces were composed by students who, according to Martin, have been released since the beginning of the course.

Participants said the process helped them overcome difficult feelings and experience joyful moments in prison.

Then, students completed approximately nine weeks of intense online instruction.

This week’s performances will feature the students’ fully realized musical compositions.

“This semester has been a lot of fun,” Grow said. “I continue to be amazed at the work this program has done and I only hope the students enjoyed it half as much as I did.”

You can contact staff writer Madison Smalstig at [email protected]. On X (Twitter) @madi.smals.