The UCSC Department of Music presents April in Santa Cruz Contemporary Music Festival, the month-long series of free concerts featuring works by UC Santa Cruz faculty and graduate students. Concerts feature numerous styles and performers.
4/6, Saturday
Quantum Elders Hip-Bop Ballet
Global-African dance, spoken word, winds, strings, percussion, turntable, beat box, and digital artwork. Hesterian Musicism is the creative process through which Professor Karlton Hester’s compositional and performance style merge to give rise to aesthetic environments where other musicians, kinetic and visual artists, and poets can meet to produce new art forms through imaginative effort.
4/12, Friday
Sinister Resonance: The American Ultramodernists and Beyond
Recent music by UCSC faculty composers
David Cope, Chris Pratorius Gómez, David Evan Jones, Hi Kyung Kim, and others. Plus William Coulter’s arrangement of “Sinister Resonance,” a 1930 composition by Henry Cowell, and professor Larry Polansky’s arrangement of “Sacco, Vanzetti,” a 1932 composition
by Ruth Crawford Seeger.
4/13, Saturday
Del Sol String Quartet
& Percussionist Chris Froh
The world-renowned Del Sol String Quartet and critically acclaimed percussionist Chris Froh premiere compositions by cutting-edge young composers. The concert will cap a 6-day residency during which the performers will work intensively with each of the graduate student composers Marguerite Brown, Yunxiang Gao, Ryan Harvey, Feona Jones and Jinwei Sun to realize their highly individual visions.
4/26, Friday
UCSC Percussion Ensemble
& Sundanese Gamelan
The ensembles collaborate in a rare performance of
James Tenney’s “Road to Ubud” for gamelan and prepared piano. The program will also feature works by Edgard Varèse and Jon Gibson and premieres by UCSC composers Ben Carson and Hi Kyung Kim.
4/27, Saturday
wasteLAnd
This innovative 12-piece chamber orchestra from Los Angeles performs new music by UCSC graduate student composers Heeyoung Choi, Zach Hejny, Ike Minton, Bryndan Moondy, Jonathan Myers, Andrew C. Smith, and Assaf Shatil. The works on the program are the culmination of a multi-day residency in which the ensemble will work directly with the composers.
Sponsors: Trevor Coates, the Vincent J. Coates Foundation, Porter College (UCSC), Music Department (UCSC), Arts Division (UCSC).
FREE and open to the public.
Parking $5.
Doors open at 7:00 pm.
Concerts start at 7:30 pm.