Aurora Cares 2024

For several years now, during the Aurora Festival, a small ensemble has been going to a department of the UMCG hospital for several mornings in a row to play music in the rooms for patients and their nurses. This is the Meaningful Music in Healthcare (MiMiC) program, which was developed by the Lifelong Learning in Music professorship at the Hanze University of Applied Sciences. This year, the festival is also going to patients at the UMCG: cviolinist Luca Altdorfer, violinist Krista de Wit, and cellist Diederik Smulders can be found on one of the surgical wards during the festival.

The program they perform is personalized. It consists of repertoire from all imaginable genres, as well as personalized improvisation: in the moment, a composition is created 'tailored' to a patient, or to a group of patients, which can be about a landscape, a journey, or a feeling, for example. It is experienced as meaningful, also by the musicians! Aurora Cares contributes significantly to the well-being of patients and their nurses.