Arts & Culture
April in Santa Cruz: Experimental music festival explores new traditions
The annual April in Santa Cruz Festival of Creative Music (AiSC) returns this year with UC Santa Cruz faculty and graduate students, renowned guest artists, and several visiting artists.
The annual April in Santa Cruz Festival of Creative Music (AiSC) returns this year with UC Santa Cruz faculty and graduate students, renowned guest artists, and several visiting artists.
Since the late 1970s, UC Santa Cruz has put on the annual “April in Santa Cruz Festival of Creative Music.” Ben Leeds Carson, a music professor and one of the organizers of the event, says it’s influenced by two experimental American traditions — the Central California-New York City tradition under John Cage and the Chicago-based Association for the Advancement of Creative Music, which includes people like Anthony Braxton and Roscoe Mitchell.
Carson adds that a few of the events this year depart from the festival’s norms — at the opening event, titled NOIZ, on April 15, undergraduate composers and improvisers have formed a unique collaboration with spoken-word poet and musician Azmera Hammouri-Davis and Brazilian rapper Edd Wheeler. Carson says our students are lucky to have the mentorship of Assistant Professor akua naru, who has been called the “Toni Morrison of hip hop,” in this collaboration.
The May 1 performance with Christopher Clarino stands out in that the percussionist dedicates himself to making music that centers aurally diverse listeners and listeners with hearing impairments.“He brings text and image and American Sign Language into his performances in powerful and interesting ways,” Carson said. “Jay Afrisando [another professor in the department] is a scholar in that area, and he has played a big role in shaping the work of the UCSC doctoral composers whose music Clarino will play, Shanna Sordahl, Nilufar Habibian, and Marc Perez.”
Music on the Meadow on Friday, May 8, also offers something different. Situated near the ocean and in the redwoods, the UC Santa Cruz campus doesn’t have a typical pavilion or a plaza as its center, but rather The Great Meadow, a defining feature of the campus, Carson says.
“Our inaugural Music on the Meadow event is a radical space for listening, that’s outside the norms of a festival,” he said. “Jay Afrisando is working with students to develop radical listening practices in, and with, nature, listening creatively and generously, in ways that might form interspecies connection.”
The festival will also present an evening of protest songs,A Change is Gonna Come; pianist Keisuke Nakagoshi with Rippling Resistance, and Rain; the ABC Ensemble, a multi-piano ensemble led by Professors Amy Beal and Ben Carson graduate-student-led ensemble This never happened; and “Of Nature and Cosmos” a concert featuring Iranian and Chinese virtuosos with San Francisco’ Del Sol Quartet.
Carson says the department starts working on the festival months ahead of time, asking colleagues and students what kind of exploratory music they’re working on that could be brought to the foreground. A core group of about 100 audience members attend the festival every year, Carson says, and the department members reach out to people both on campus and off so attendance keeps growing.
One of the things making the festival special is that while experimental, it also draws on traditions, Carson says.
“That’s why we’ve been able to attract such tremendously gifted virtuosos as our Iranian, Korean, Chinese, and Mexican students whose playing really transcends or escapes the norms of the Western tradition,” he said. “Our international composers come here because they know we take seriously what it means to be in a dynamic dialogue, among musicians whose experiences and cultures differ rather than allowing institutionalized traditions — to operate as unquestioned, default spaces.
“They come here to build that skill, to build that awareness of what it means to think across traditions. I don’t think there are a lot of festivals that really do that in the open-ended way that we do, and I think that’s what people come away with when they come to see April in Santa Cruz. We hope they’ll be as enthralled by the possibilities as we are.”