April in Santa Cruz Creative Music and Arts Festival 2024: "A Time For Change"

The annual month-long celebration of the arts is back at UC Santa Cruz. There will be almost a dozen performances by talented professionals in art forms including dance, animation and much more. April in Santa Cruz is an opportunity for the community to experience the best of emerging and established artists.

This year’s festival was organized by Festival Co-director James Gordon Williams, a composer, pianist, and cultural theorist who joined UCSC’s faculty in 2023; and Festival Director Karlton Hester, a professor of music who is known for accomplishments including starting the San Francisco Fillmore Jazz Preservation Big Band and creating a new form of musical theory known as Hesterian Musicism. Hester is an internationally recognized musician who has received grants and commissions from the National Endowment of the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, a postdoctoral fellowship from the Mellon Foundation, amongst others. He also serves as the director of Digital Arts and New Media as well as Associate Dean of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at UC Santa Cruz.

“Since its inception, The April in Santa Cruz Music Festival has promoted European music and that leaves out the most influential global music and music of marginalized artists,” says Hester describing his reason for taking over the event. “For the first time, The April in Santa Cruz events emphasize women, underrepresented, LGBTQ, as well as BIPOC composers and performing artists.” Hester also helped make this upcoming festival the largest one to date.

Jay Afrisando, an assistant professor of music who curated the performance featuring composer and performer Molly Joyce (deemed one of the “most versatile, prolific and intriguing composers working under the vast new-music dome” by The Washington Post) and composed a piece that will be played by Third Coast Percussion, emphasized the focus on diversity. He stated that this year’s festival focus is crucial to breaking white supremacy patterns such as racism, patriarchy, ableism, and late capitalism and centering diverse bodies and collaboration in music, as music doesn’t happen in a vacuum.

Featured artists include but are not limited to: JLIN, a composer of electronic music who has appeared in “best of” lists in newspapers including Rolling Stone, Vogue, and The LA Times; Park Eun-ha, a percussionist and dancer from the National Gugak Center of Korea; and Joshua Rubin, and internationally recognized musician who the New York Times praised for being “incapable of playing an inexpressive note.”

There will also be featured students, such as those included in the Digital Arts and New Media MFA show, or the graduate music students who have composed pieces for several of the concerts. The organizers of composers’ workshops preceding the festival—Professors Matt Schumaker, Jay Afrisando, and Ben Carson—emphasized that April in Santa Cruz has always strived to place up-and-coming student artists “on the same stage, under the same spotlight, as the distinguished artists we bring here to learn and collaborate with them.” .

Matt Schumaker, an assistant professor of music who both curated and helped compose music for the upcoming festival, expanded on the inclusion of both students and established artists saying: “we're presenting not only diverse composers, but composers that are spanning generations.” Along with students, this includes music from groundbreaking composers from the 20th century such as the late Kaija Saariaho, who in 2016 became the first woman in 100 years to have her work performed at the Metropolitan Opera, and the late Olly Wilson whose work, which was inspired by African music, was integral to the development of electronic music.

April in Santa Cruz, while taking place on campus, is free and open to the public. It is a chance for the community, not just students, to experience performances from around the globe. “Our festival presents new cutting-edge student and professional creative music and art, unlike most other presentations in the Santa Cruz area,” says Hester.

Event Guide

Third Coast Percussion – featuring JLin and Jay Afrisando

Digital Arts Research Center (DARC)

7:30 PM

April 7, 2024

Molly Joyce

Digital Arts Research Center (DARC)

2:00 PM

April 13, 2024

"Lives Dedicated to Music"

Presenting music by six UCSC faculty composers who have been dedicated to the UCSC Music program for more than four decades.

Music Center Recital Hall