Like every other arts organization in America, the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music had to rethink its operations drastically during the COVID-19 pandemic shutdown. Not one but two full seasons of musical activities, in 2020 and 2021, had to be recast in online form.
Now the 60-year-old festival, long a centerpiece of the Bay Area’s new music world, is finally gearing up for a return to live performances — and it’s doing it with a characteristically vibrant blend of works that touch on social, political and environmental issues.
Over the course of two weeks’ worth of orchestral concerts at Santa Cruz’s Civic Auditorium, Music Director Cristian Macelaru promises to engage audiences on the subject of wildfires and climate crisis. There will be music touching on women’s suffrage, the history of the Declaration of Independence and the legacy of the Holocaust.
There will be even be some music in a purely abstract vein, if only for balance.
“It’s been Cristi’s artistic vision from the start of his tenure in 2017 to reflect the world we live in,” said Ellen Primack, the festival’s longtime and visionary executive director. “He wants to use music as a way to engage people in meaningful conversation about social topics that we think about or are concerned about. I would say we’ve been ahead of the curve in that regard.”
Some of the programming for this year’s festival can trace its origins to the years of the shutdown. “The Battle for the Ballot,” composer Stacy Garrop’s orchestral tribute to the suffragist movement, had its world premiere online in 2020, thanks to the tech wizardry of festival percussionist Svet Stoyanov.
“Contested Eden,” a mediation on climate crisis by California composer Gabriela Lena Frank, was first presented in 2021 in a virtual format, as a dance film and an orchestral recording. Both of those works are scheduled for their first live performances during the festival’s opening weekend, July 29-30.
Each of them is thematically linked to a piece coming to the festival for the first time. “End of the Rain,” a multimedia symphony commissioned from Santa Cruz native Scott Ordway, touches on the same environmental themes as Frank’s work. And “Let Me See the Sun,” a piano concerto written by Brooklyn composer Paola Prestini for soloist Lara Downes, was written to celebrate the passage of the 19th Amendment granting women the right to vote.
At the heart of Ordway’s 40-minute work, which addresses the impact of recent California wildfires, is a massive database of oral texts collected over the course of six months.
“I was emotionally impacted personally by the fires of 2020,” Ordway said in a phone interview from his home in Philadelphia. “But I knew that my own impressions of those events from my perch here weren’t quite right to base the piece on. I wanted to hear from people who were experiencing these things first hand.”
So Ordway, who teaches in the composition department of Rutgers University, garnered some 80,000 words of testimony from 225 fire survivors. Some came through a website he built for the purpose, others through school visits and focus groups with survivors and firefighters. He also drew on an oral history project at California State University at Chico.
“I started with this pile of text, and I read every last word of it looking for things that the community as a whole was saying that transcended any one individual experience,” he recalled. “As I started to see themes and topics emerging from these texts, that helped me create the structure for the piece.”
In addition to the verbal texts, sung by the virtuosic eight-member choral group Roomful of Teeth, “End of the Rain” also features a video track comprising Ordway’s images of the California landscape. It’s the latest in a series of multimedia works he has created that combine visuals with orchestral music, and it’s a combination that Ordway strives to keep as tightly interwoven as possible.
“I’ve been to a lot of multimedia performances where the music and the other media feel tenuously connected at best. But here I was creating text and music and video in a continuum, so they’re all influencing and feeding back into one another.
“It wasn’t like I did all of the text, and then set all of the text to music, and then made the video last. I’ve been continuously collecting texts, setting those texts to music and looking for images that showcase something in those words. It’s a cyclical process.”
Prestini’s concerto was originally conceived as a companion piece for Florence Price’s Piano Concerto. For Prestini — who in addition to her career as a composer is the co-founder and artistic director of the Brooklyn music venue National Sawdust — the connections between an abstract work and its political import are part of a general approach of activism.
“When Lara came to me about writing this concerto, I saw it as an opportunity to write as a woman — about our rights and everything we’re going for, which now seems more and more sadly relevant,” she said. “I’ve been thinking a lot about how to create a sense of community around the fight for equity for women, and how we can all participate in a solution together.”
In Prestini’s view, each strand of her creative and entrepreneurial activity is part of an attempt to broaden opportunities for women and other disadvantaged groups. That includes the creation of the concerto, which had its world premiere in June at the Oregon Bach Festival in Eugene.
One relic of the pandemic shutdown, Primack said, is being carried forward: The festival’s open rehearsals and composer talks, beginning July 24, will now be available for live streaming. But the opportunity to hear the music live, for the first time in more than two years, promises to bring an additional emotional element to the proceedings.
“Those moments are really going to be very special,” Primack said. “One of the things we learned over the last two years is that music is really an experience that has to happen in the physical here and now. It’s a conversation, and it’s so important that we’re back together now.”
Joshua Kosman
July 19, 2022
Like every other arts organization in America, the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music had to rethink its operations drastically during the COVID-19 pandemic shutdown. Not one but two full seasons of musical activities, in 2020 and 2021, had to be recast in online form.
Now the 60-year-old festival, long a centerpiece of the Bay Area’s new music world, is finally gearing up for a return to live performances — and it’s doing it with a characteristically vibrant blend of works that touch on social, political and environmental issues.
Over the course of two weeks’ worth of orchestral concerts at Santa Cruz’s Civic Auditorium, Music Director Cristian Macelaru promises to engage audiences on the subject of wildfires and climate crisis. There will be music touching on women’s suffrage, the history of the Declaration of Independence and the legacy of the Holocaust.
There will be even be some music in a purely abstract vein, if only for balance.
“It’s been Cristi’s artistic vision from the start of his tenure in 2017 to reflect the world we live in,” said Ellen Primack, the festival’s longtime and visionary executive director. “He wants to use music as a way to engage people in meaningful conversation about social topics that we think about or are concerned about. I would say we’ve been ahead of the curve in that regard.”
Some of the programming for this year’s festival can trace its origins to the years of the shutdown. “The Battle for the Ballot,” composer Stacy Garrop’s orchestral tribute to the suffragist movement, had its world premiere online in 2020, thanks to the tech wizardry of festival percussionist Svet Stoyanov.
“Contested Eden,” a mediation on climate crisis by California composer Gabriela Lena Frank, was first presented in 2021 in a virtual format, as a dance film and an orchestral recording. Both of those works are scheduled for their first live performances during the festival’s opening weekend, July 29-30.
Each of them is thematically linked to a piece coming to the festival for the first time. “End of the Rain,” a multimedia symphony commissioned from Santa Cruz native Scott Ordway, touches on the same environmental themes as Frank’s work. And “Let Me See the Sun,” a piano concerto written by Brooklyn composer Paola Prestini for soloist Lara Downes, was written to celebrate the passage of the 19th Amendment granting women the right to vote.
At the heart of Ordway’s 40-minute work, which addresses the impact of recent California wildfires, is a massive database of oral texts collected over the course of six months.
“I was emotionally impacted personally by the fires of 2020,” Ordway said in a phone interview from his home in Philadelphia. “But I knew that my own impressions of those events from my perch here weren’t quite right to base the piece on. I wanted to hear from people who were experiencing these things first hand.”
So Ordway, who teaches in the composition department of Rutgers University, garnered some 80,000 words of testimony from 225 fire survivors. Some came through a website he built for the purpose, others through school visits and focus groups with survivors and firefighters. He also drew on an oral history project at California State University at Chico.
“I started with this pile of text, and I read every last word of it looking for things that the community as a whole was saying that transcended any one individual experience,” he recalled. “As I started to see themes and topics emerging from these texts, that helped me create the structure for the piece.”
In addition to the verbal texts, sung by the virtuosic eight-member choral group Roomful of Teeth, “End of the Rain” also features a video track comprising Ordway’s images of the California landscape. It’s the latest in a series of multimedia works he has created that combine visuals with orchestral music, and it’s a combination that Ordway strives to keep as tightly interwoven as possible.
“I’ve been to a lot of multimedia performances where the music and the other media feel tenuously connected at best. But here I was creating text and music and video in a continuum, so they’re all influencing and feeding back into one another.
“It wasn’t like I did all of the text, and then set all of the text to music, and then made the video last. I’ve been continuously collecting texts, setting those texts to music and looking for images that showcase something in those words. It’s a cyclical process.”
Prestini’s concerto was originally conceived as a companion piece for Florence Price’s Piano Concerto. For Prestini — who in addition to her career as a composer is the co-founder and artistic director of the Brooklyn music venue National Sawdust — the connections between an abstract work and its political import are part of a general approach of activism.
“When Lara came to me about writing this concerto, I saw it as an opportunity to write as a woman — about our rights and everything we’re going for, which now seems more and more sadly relevant,” she said. “I’ve been thinking a lot about how to create a sense of community around the fight for equity for women, and how we can all participate in a solution together.”
In Prestini’s view, each strand of her creative and entrepreneurial activity is part of an attempt to broaden opportunities for women and other disadvantaged groups. That includes the creation of the concerto, which had its world premiere in June at the Oregon Bach Festival in Eugene.
One relic of the pandemic shutdown, Primack said, is being carried forward: The festival’s open rehearsals and composer talks, beginning July 24, will now be available for live streaming. But the opportunity to hear the music live, for the first time in more than two years, promises to bring an additional emotional element to the proceedings.
“Those moments are really going to be very special,” Primack said. “One of the things we learned over the last two years is that music is really an experience that has to happen in the physical here and now. It’s a conversation, and it’s so important that we’re back together now.”
Joshua Kosman
July 19, 2022
Like every other arts organization in America, the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music had to rethink its operations drastically during the COVID-19 pandemic shutdown. Not one but two full seasons of musical activities, in 2020 and 2021, had to be recast in online form.
Now the 60-year-old festival, long a centerpiece of the Bay Area’s new music world, is finally gearing up for a return to live performances — and it’s doing it with a characteristically vibrant blend of works that touch on social, political and environmental issues.
Over the course of two weeks’ worth of orchestral concerts at Santa Cruz’s Civic Auditorium, Music Director Cristian Macelaru promises to engage audiences on the subject of wildfires and climate crisis. There will be music touching on women’s suffrage, the history of the Declaration of Independence and the legacy of the Holocaust.
There will be even be some music in a purely abstract vein, if only for balance.
“It’s been Cristi’s artistic vision from the start of his tenure in 2017 to reflect the world we live in,” said Ellen Primack, the festival’s longtime and visionary executive director. “He wants to use music as a way to engage people in meaningful conversation about social topics that we think about or are concerned about. I would say we’ve been ahead of the curve in that regard.”
Some of the programming for this year’s festival can trace its origins to the years of the shutdown. “The Battle for the Ballot,” composer Stacy Garrop’s orchestral tribute to the suffragist movement, had its world premiere online in 2020, thanks to the tech wizardry of festival percussionist Svet Stoyanov.
“Contested Eden,” a mediation on climate crisis by California composer Gabriela Lena Frank, was first presented in 2021 in a virtual format, as a dance film and an orchestral recording. Both of those works are scheduled for their first live performances during the festival’s opening weekend, July 29-30.
Each of them is thematically linked to a piece coming to the festival for the first time. “End of the Rain,” a multimedia symphony commissioned from Santa Cruz native Scott Ordway, touches on the same environmental themes as Frank’s work. And “Let Me See the Sun,” a piano concerto written by Brooklyn composer Paola Prestini for soloist Lara Downes, was written to celebrate the passage of the 19th Amendment granting women the right to vote.
At the heart of Ordway’s 40-minute work, which addresses the impact of recent California wildfires, is a massive database of oral texts collected over the course of six months.
“I was emotionally impacted personally by the fires of 2020,” Ordway said in a phone interview from his home in Philadelphia. “But I knew that my own impressions of those events from my perch here weren’t quite right to base the piece on. I wanted to hear from people who were experiencing these things first hand.”
So Ordway, who teaches in the composition department of Rutgers University, garnered some 80,000 words of testimony from 225 fire survivors. Some came through a website he built for the purpose, others through school visits and focus groups with survivors and firefighters. He also drew on an oral history project at California State University at Chico.
“I started with this pile of text, and I read every last word of it looking for things that the community as a whole was saying that transcended any one individual experience,” he recalled. “As I started to see themes and topics emerging from these texts, that helped me create the structure for the piece.”
In addition to the verbal texts, sung by the virtuosic eight-member choral group Roomful of Teeth, “End of the Rain” also features a video track comprising Ordway’s images of the California landscape. It’s the latest in a series of multimedia works he has created that combine visuals with orchestral music, and it’s a combination that Ordway strives to keep as tightly interwoven as possible.
“I’ve been to a lot of multimedia performances where the music and the other media feel tenuously connected at best. But here I was creating text and music and video in a continuum, so they’re all influencing and feeding back into one another.
“It wasn’t like I did all of the text, and then set all of the text to music, and then made the video last. I’ve been continuously collecting texts, setting those texts to music and looking for images that showcase something in those words. It’s a cyclical process.”
Prestini’s concerto was originally conceived as a companion piece for Florence Price’s Piano Concerto. For Prestini — who in addition to her career as a composer is the co-founder and artistic director of the Brooklyn music venue National Sawdust — the connections between an abstract work and its political import are part of a general approach of activism.
“When Lara came to me about writing this concerto, I saw it as an opportunity to write as a woman — about our rights and everything we’re going for, which now seems more and more sadly relevant,” she said. “I’ve been thinking a lot about how to create a sense of community around the fight for equity for women, and how we can all participate in a solution together.”
In Prestini’s view, each strand of her creative and entrepreneurial activity is part of an attempt to broaden opportunities for women and other disadvantaged groups. That includes the creation of the concerto, which had its world premiere in June at the Oregon Bach Festival in Eugene.
One relic of the pandemic shutdown, Primack said, is being carried forward: The festival’s open rehearsals and composer talks, beginning July 24, will now be available for live streaming. But the opportunity to hear the music live, for the first time in more than two years, promises to bring an additional emotional element to the proceedings.
“Those moments are really going to be very special,” Primack said. “One of the things we learned over the last two years is that music is really an experience that has to happen in the physical here and now. It’s a conversation, and it’s so important that we’re back together now.”
Joshua Kosman
July 19, 2022
