Eureka’s Dazzling Symphonic Community

I grew up in the 1950s in Connecticut, where the farsighted school system subsidized music lessons for kids on Saturday mornings. What a deal! When I turned 8, my mother asked the high school music teacher which instrument he would need in his orchestra in four or five years. “Cello,” he guessed. A lucky choice for me.

One of many joys of playing an instrument is that wherever you go, there is a community of musicians to hook up with. When my husband, Ralph, and I moved to Eureka in 1992, we were just in time to join the brand-new Eureka Symphony, founded the year before by Kenneth Hannaford. Ken was a choral conductor at heart, and we played Brahms’ German Requiem and gave the North Coast premiere of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. In 1994, we performed “Peter and the Wolf,” stirring the wrath of cellist/ wolf activist Anne Conrad-Antoville and inadvertently landing ourselves on the national news.

Clearly, I had come to the right place. This was a true community orchestra: local, quirky, committed.

Carol Jacobson was the symphony’s principal cello in those days. She left in 1995, founded the ArMack Orchestra and discovered her calling as a conductor. In 1996, Ken died, leaving the orchestra bereft. Two music professors, Valgene Phillips and Ken Ayoob, kindly stepped in to conduct.

When Ralph and I moved out of the area for work in 2000, we left a Eureka Symphony that was cooking, but not yet the force on the local classical music scene it would become. We missed the moment in 2003 when Carol stepped onto the podium, but I can easily imagine what it felt like when her energy burst onto the scene, setting off decades of growth and expansion.

In 2019, I moved back to Eureka, by myself this time, Ralph having died while we were gone. I’d been away almost 20 years, but somehow my seat in the symphony was still warm. I slid into it, filled with gratitude.

The orchestra, meanwhile, had leveled up. It now had professional musicians like Terrie Baune and Garrick Woods in leading roles. Carol, now conductor and artistic director, was choosing challenging repertoire and bringing in amazing soloists. But the best part, to me, was the symphony’s commitment to us, the orchestra players. Carol could have chosen to bring in ringers, players from out of the area who would join us for the final rehearsals, play the concert, and depart. Many community ensembles do exactly that. But she decided this was not how the Eureka Symphony would work.

The symphony’s motto, “World Classics, North Coast Musicians,” is earned. Who would have imagined that our little community could field an ensemble as vital as the Eureka Symphony? What luck to be part of it! Find out more about this season’s five Arkley Center concerts at eurekasymphony.org/.

Elizabeth Morrison of Eureka is a cellist with the Eureka Symphony.