Costa Rica Project

CU Winds / Costa Rica: A Partnership through Music

The Cornell University Wind Ensemble CU Winds, comprising up to 50 of Cornell’s best undergraduate wind and percussion players, returned to Costa Rica for a performing and outreach tour during Winter Break in January 2008. The CU Winds tour helped fulfill Cornell’s mission to unite education and service and deepen the educational lives of involved students. Every two years, CU Winds plans to return to Costa Rica.

Costa Rica Project
Photo Credit: CU Winds File Photo

Cornell’s Director of Wind Ensembles, Assistant Professor Cynthia Johnston Turner, reached agreement with a number of key individuals in Costa Rica on the vision for this joint project. Costa Rican collaborators included North American Cultural Center executives Jerry Ledin and Manuel Arce; composer and performer Eddie Mora from the University of Costa Rica; Alejandro Gutierrez, performer, conductor and National Orchestra member; Star Cunningham, sponsor of a new music school in the rural town of Matapalo in Guanacaste; National Opera Company of Costa Rica director, Christine Komatsu; and Lyn Statten, chair of the outreach committee of the Canadian Club of Costa Rica.

In January, 2008 CU Winds performed concerts in San Jose at the U.S. Embassy, the Eugene O’Neill Theater at the North American Cultural Center, and at several community based locations. Another important aspect of the tour will bring Cornell musicians to several rural communities, including San Isidro, which has a performing arts school for talented Costa Rican students who attend on scholarship. Here, the CU Winds students and conductor coached the young Costa Rican musicians as well as performed with and for them. This is similar to activities in Matapalo in January 2006.

Matapalo Music School
Report from Matapalo, Costa Rica: Double enrolment in Matapalo Music School.

Photo Credit: Matapalo Music School

Cultural and language exchanges are integral to the experience. CU WINDS students are expected to learn some Spanish in preparation for the Costa Rica tour. This deepens their experience and increase the opportunity to develop longer lasting friendships with the students they interact with in Costa Rica. CU Winds student leaders also aid in the planning and execution of travel and cultural exchange.

CU Winds offers undergraduate students the opportunity for this performing tour as an intense, transformative experience. Students are challenged to commit many months of work to the group’s goals of making music and performing service. They move from the known to the unknown and live in an environment in which they are expected to call upon and discover reserves which they were not aware were theirs to command. Professor Turner’s experience with similar groups shows that music is able to function as the critical tool to unify the group both internally and across cultures. In addition, students learn how, through their full commitment, the group becomes larger than the sum of their individual identities, thus encouraging them to increase their own wills to achieve as well as their standards of performance and behavior.

Professor Turner has initiated an active musical partnership in Costa Rica. CU Winds again commissioned Costa Rican composer, violinist, and University of Costa Rica faculty member, Eddie Mora, to compose 15 minute original violin concerto for winds and percussion designed to unite traditional Costa Rican rhythms with classical wind timbres. In addition, Professor Mora's violin student, Erasmo Solerti, will visited Cornell University as a guest of the music department in the Fall of 2007 to rehearse Mora's composition with CU Winds, perform a classical recital of his and other Costa Rican composers’ music, interact with composition faculty and students at Cornell, and performed the world premiere. When CU Winds traveled to Costa Rica, they performed the Costa Rican premiere in San Jose together with local musicians.

CU Winds Project

Instruments for Costa Rican Students

Prior to their departure on the January 2008 tour, and thereafter, the Cornell University wind ensemble members solicit donations of musical instruments in the United States that they then leave behind in Costa Rica. The Cornell students have several local (NY) partners to help with instrument reconditioning (if needed) and logistics.

If you can contribute:

Woodwind and/or brass instruments in any condition
Mallet percussion instruments
Accessories (neck straps, mutes, metronomes, cases, tuners, valve oil, swabs, unopened boxes of reeds)
Cash for the purchase or repair of instruments

Please e-mail Peter Turner at or Cynthia Johnston Turner at with details and he will work with you on valuation, shipping, and gift receipt for tax purposes.

Costa Rica Project