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festival history Winner of the American Symphony Orchestra League’s national ASCAP Award for Adventuresome Programming of Contemporary Music every year since the award’s inception twenty years ago in 1982, Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music is America’s preeminent contemporary music festival. Our story begins in the summer of 1961 when young composer-musician Robert Hughes stepped from a Greyhound bus at the Sticky Wicket, an Aptos, California coffeehouse along the then two-lane Highway 1. He had just arrived from Italy to study with composer Lou Harrison. At the same time, Hughes joined Sticky Wicket owners Vic and Sidney Jowers and others to present quality music and theater at the coffeehouse. Nearly 200 people could be seated before a wooden stage in the field next door to enjoy a Stravinsky opera or a chamber music concert. A year later, Cabrillo College opened its Aptos campus. Faculty choral director Ted Toews and soprano Alyce Vestal joined the Sticky Wicket gang and Lou Harrison to help shape the expansion of the Sticky Wicket Concert Series into Cabrillo Music Festival. Gene Hambelton and area newcomer Bud Kretschmer became part of that group as it progressed. About 300 people attended opening night at the Cabrillo College Theater, August 21, 1963. At 8:15 p.m., a thrill rippled through the audience when the Festival’s first conductor Gerhard Samuels, stepped to the podium! Now audiences fill Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium, home to the Festival since 1991, to cheer Marin Alsop in her twelfth season at "America’s Contemporary Music Festival." Alsop joins a long succession of distinguished music directors dedicated to new music for orchestra: Gerhard Samuel (1963-68), composer Carlos Chávez (1970-73), conductor Dennis Russell Davies (1974-1990), and American composer John Adams (1991). Since its founding, the Festival has presented 77 world premieres, 49 US premieres, 75 West Coast premieres and countless local premieres and included the participation of more than 130 composers such as John Adams, John Cage, Aaron Copland, Elliott Carter, Philip Glass, Joan Tower, Terry Riley, Libby Larsen, Christopher Rouse, Joseph Schwantner, Virgil Thompson, Keith Jarrett, Tania Leon, Pauline Oliveros, Arvo Pärt, Carlos Chávez, and William Bolcom. The Wall Street Journal has called it "two of the most thoughtful and original summer musical weekends anywhere in America." photos from top: Gerhard Samuel, Carlos Chávez, Dennis Russell Davies, Aaron Copland, Marin Alsop
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