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-five 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 music director, Gerhard Samuel, stepped to the podium!
Now
audiences fill Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium, home to the Festival since
1991, to cheer Marin Alsop in her seventeenth 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 84 world premieres, 52 U.S.
premieres, 100 West Coast premieres and countless local premieres and
included the participation of more than 132 composers such as John
Adams, William Bolcom, John Cage, Elliott Carter, Carlos Chávez, Aaron
Copland, John Corigliano, Michael Daugherty, Philip Glass, Lou
Harrison, Keith Jarrett, Aaron Jay Kernis, Libby Larsen, Tania Leon,
Thea Musgrave, Pauline Oliveros, Arvo Pärt, Christopher Rouse, Joseph
Schwantner, Virgil Thomson, and Joan Tower. The Wall Street Journal has
called it "two of the most thoughtful and original summer musical
weekends anywhere in America."
For current perspectives on the Festival go to: News & Reviews
Photo caption (clockwise beginning L): Sticky Wicket coffeehouse, Aptos, 1960s; Dennis Russell Davies, Gerhard Samuel, Marin Alsop, Aaron Copland, and Carlos Chávez.
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