April in Santa Cruz Contemporary Music Festival

April in Santa Cruz Contemporary Music Festival Dates: April 13, 14, 17, 21: UC Santa Cruz Music Center Recital Hall, UC Santa Cruz Campus
April 30: The Lab, 2948 16th Street, San Francisco, CA 94103

This year's April in Santa Cruz Contemporary Music Festival takes up forces of dedication and imagination featuring wide-ranging musicians: from the San Francisco-based Del Sol String Quartet to sound artist/composer Anna Friz; from pianist Eric Huebner to UCSC’s Music Department’s newest faculty member James Gordon Williams. The UC Santa Cruz Music Department is thrilled to present such talented artists of the UC Santa Cruz and Bay Area communities, arriving from dozens of international starting points and traversing even more varied walks of life. All performances are live, in person, and free to the public.

Departing from the norm of new music festivals, April in Santa Cruz is much more than a month of concerts: it's a year-long engagement, in which graduate students work, remotely and in person, with the festival's performers. Composers embark on a cycle of imagining new possibilities, trying them out, and then imagining again, fostering some of the best education an emerging artist can hope to gain: the insight of collaboration with musicians on the cutting edge of what it means to produce and perform new music.

“The April in Santa Cruz Festival of New Music has been an emblem of innovation and experimentation for decades in central California—and we're bringing uncommon energy and collaborative vision to its newest season,” said Ben Leeds Carson, associate professor of music, renowned composer, and April in Santa Cruz producer. “Alongside our internationally acclaimed guests, this festival is also a product of long-inspired work by intrepid UCSC doctoral composers, who've come to us from China, Iran, Israel, Mexico, and from across the United States—eight bold artists who have written new works in direct collaboration with the festival's diverse guest artists.”

April in Santa Cruz Program:

April 13, 7:30 PM: Festival Opening
Music Center Performance Studio (131), UCSC
The festival opens with violinist Kate Stenberg, percussionist Willie Winant, clarinetist John Sackett, pianist Ben Carson, saxophonist Shay Salhov, and friends... introducing the festival with the music of Hi Kyung Kim, David Evan Jones, and Keshav Batish. Plus electronic music by Jeffrey Treviño.

April 14, 7:30 PM: Del Sol Quartet
Music Center Recital Hall, UCSC
Featuring San Francisco's Del Sol Quartet ("excavations of beauty from the elemental”—New York Times; "luminous yet corporeal"—Los Angeles Times) presents A Dust In Time, by celebrated Chinese-American composer Huang Ro ("“one of the world’s leading young composers”—New Yorker; "powerful...engrossing"—The New York Times); world premieres of new works by Christopher Everingham, Nina Barzegar, Vahid Jahandari, and a sextet featuring Scott Siler (percussion) and Shenshen Zhang (pipa/Chinese lute) by Jinwei Sun.

April 17, 7:30 PM: Pianist Eric Huebner
Music Center Recital Hall, UCSC
Featuring celebrated pianist Eric Huebner ("phenomenal...an MVP of the New York new music scene”, L.A. Weekly; “masterfully precise” Kyle Gann/The Village Voice) brings us a pre-premiere of Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Roger Reynolds' new work ACTIONS, as well as the music of Leah Muir, Ben Leeds Carson, Ben Dorfan, Ohal Grietzer, and Matthew Schumaker.

April 21, 7:30 PM: Anna Friz with Percussionist Willie Winant
Music Center Recital Hall, UCSC
Sound artist / composer Anna Friz in concert with Percussionist Willie Winant and the UCSC Percussion Ensemble, featuring the inventions of Friz, Christopher Everingham, Michael Fleming, Vahid Jahandari, and others.

April 30, 3:00 PM: San Francisco Contemporary Music Players and James Gordon Williams
The LAB in San Francisco
SPECIAL EVENT: Bay Area new music luminaries Peter Josheff, Douglas Machiz, Kevin Rogers, Scott Siler, are joined by composer-pianist James Gordon Williams, newly a member of the UC Santa Cruz Faculty, in a concert at The Lab in San Francisco, that will include the music of Williams, and world premieres of music by Ben Dorfan, Michael Fleming, and Rodrigo Barriga.