Miró Quartet put their beloved home of Austin in the spotlight in the video for their new single Over The Rainbow — showcasing today on Tinnitist.
Shot at iconic sites across the city and set to an arrangement of Harold Arlen’s classic ballad from The Wizard Of Oz, the release offers a preview of the string quartet’s forthcoming (and fittingly titled) album Home, due May 10. The record’s closing track, the iconic movie tune arranged by William Ryden is a soaring message of hopefulness that encourages listeners to never stop dreaming.
Celebrating 30 years as an ensemble in 2025, the Grammy-nominated Texans explore the many meanings of “home” through works by four Pulitzer Prize-winning American composers, including two new commissions by Kevin Puts and Caroline Shaw that are paired with works by George Walker and Samuel Barber.
“This album is the culmination of a long and creative process of discovery, exploring our relationships with living composers as well as exploring and recording the existing core repertoire of American string quartet music,” Miró Quartet share. “It has been an exciting musical journey that ultimately has brought us home as musicians in a new and special way.
“To us, Home represents stability and safety, yet human life is a journey of constant change, acquisition and loss. We travel away from our origins, and hopefully onwards towards our goals, our vision of true home. And as much as needing and having a home is a universal experience, leaving a home and starting life’s journey out on one’s own is also a pivotal moment of growth for every one of us.
“Kevin Puts and Caroline Shaw are friends whom we know well and are both valued parts of our personal and artistic lives, and the string quartets they wrote for us certainly feel like ‘hobme’ to us: Their sound worlds are a familiar and beloved musical space that we feel comfortable inhabiting, a sonic structure that reflects the concerns and values that we four as people care and worry about, both as we make music together and as we go about our lives in this challenging home world that we all share.”
The opening title work Home (2019), the third piece Puts has written for Miró Quartet, was nominated as an arrangement for quartet and chorus for a 2024 Grammy for Best Choral Performance. Inspired by the plight of Syrian refugees fleeing to Europe, Puts uses the structural elements of the piece to depict this experience of displacement. The comfortable key of C Major is used by the composer as a pleasant and idyllic representation of home — which is abandoned after the work’s first several minutes in search of new and unfamiliar harmonic terrain.
While they have toured internationally for three decades, the U.S. has been Miró’s physical and cultural home for nearly 30 years. In this album, they capture great American works such as the Barber Adagio — part of the musical fabric of their lives since their earliest playing days — alongside less familiar American works that have been incorporated into their repertoire more recently, representing the powerful but sometimes unacknowledged threads that often run deeply through our concept of “home.” The album also features Barber’s String Quartet in B minor, Op. 11, containing the famously stirring American concert staple Adagio for Strings.
Formed in 1995, Miró Quartet have been awarded first prize at national and international competitions including the Banff International String Quartet Competition and the Naumburg Chamber Music Competition. Deeply committed to music education, members of the quartet have given master classes at universities and conservatories throughout the world, and since 2003, Miró have served as the quartet-in-residence at the University of Texas at Austin Sarah and Ernest Butler School of Music. In 2005, they became the first ensemble awarded the coveted Avery Fisher Career Grant.
Miró Quartet took their name and inspiration from the Spanish artist Joan Miró, whose surrealist works — with subject matter drawn from the realm of memory, dreams, and imaginative fantasy — are some of the most groundbreaking, influential, and admired of the 20th century.
Watch the video for Over The Rainbow above, hear more from Miró Quartet below, pre-order Home HERE, and make yourself comfortable on their website, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
