2026 Program Guide | Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music

18 ROBERT HUGHES (1933–2022) Robert Grove Hughes studied music composition at the University of Buffalo with Aaron Copland and Carlos Chávez. Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, he composed orchestral, chamber, and vocal works, ballets, film scores, and electronic music. He was composer-in-residence with the San Francisco Symphony and the Rockefeller Bellagio Center, and a Fulbright Scholar in Italy. A lifelong advocate for new music, Hughes founded several ensembles to reimagine orchestral programming. He co-founded the Cabrillo Music Festival with Lou Harrison in 1963 and was invited to create hybrid work for electronics and orchestra ( Radiances, 1971), Auras (1972), Quadroquartet (1973), and Cones (1975). He also co-founded Berkeley’s Arch Ensemble for Experimental Music with Thomas Buckner. Hughes premiered and recorded Ezra Pound’s 1923 opera Le Testament (1971). With his wife, choreographer/scholar Margaret Fisher, he issued performance editions of the poet’s complete musical oeuvre. Hughes shaped a generation of musicians through the Youth Chamber Orchestra that he founded in 1964. The ensemble toured nationally and recorded on the Desto label, specializing in new music, international repertoire mirroring the people of diaspora who settled in California, and multimedia works. Their project The Black Composer in America addressed the neglect of contemporary Black composers and toured the American South in 1970. His final major work, Silenus’ Antiphonary, published this year, combines music, text, and visual art using synesthetic techniques. HANNAH ISHIZAKI Hannah Ishizaki is a composer and soundartist based inPrinceton, New Jersey. Described as “Imaginative…effective and moving” by the New York Times, her music seeks to foster connections between musicians and the audience through the explorations of the physicality of music performance. Ishizaki finds inspiration in the process of composition, leading her to experiment with a wide range of instruments and sound generating methods—from acoustic instruments in an orchestra to digital sensors to rocks and zippers. Immersed in the world of collaboration, Ishizaki has worked with dancers, actors, filmmakers, and visual artists, to connect the seemingly unconnected and create innovative and multidisciplinary projects. Ishizaki is the current Composer-in- Residence with Young Concert Artists. ​Ishizaki’s work has been recognized throughout the United States and internationally, and her compositions have been performed by renowned musicians and ensembles such as Midori Goto, Ensemble Intercontemporain, Sō Percussion, the Attacca Quartet, the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, the New Jersey Symphony, the National Sawdust Ensemble, Karen Gomyo, Nathan Meltzer, Kevin Zhu, Mira Wang, Guy Johnston, and Sterling Elliot. Recently, Ishizaki was named one of five 2023 Hildegard commission winners, which is presented by National Sawdust and generously supported by The Onassis Foundation and the Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation. In 2017, she became the youngest woman ever to have a world premiere with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. In the summer of 2022, Ishizaki was the artist-in-residence for the Stiftung für Kunst undMusik, Dresden, writing a variety of chamber, orchestral, and vocal works based on the deconstruction of words and meaning. During her time in Dresden, she completed a String Octet that was premiered at the closing concert of the Moritzburg Festival. In March of 2022, she completed a residency in the Henriquez (“The Boat”) Studio at Banff, where she researched and conceptualized for an evening-length work for the sounds of dance. Ishizaki is currently a PhD candidate in Music Composition and a recipient of the Mark Nelson Fellowship at Princeton University. Previous teachers have included David Ludwig and Chris Massa. She studied with Andrew Norman for composition and Areta Zhulla and Ronald Copes for violin at The Juilliard School, where she was the first composer to receive a Kovner Fellowship. ELENA KATS-CHERNIN Born in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, Elena Kats-Chernin is a Sydney- based Australian composer. She's had two pieces performed at Cabrillo Festival previously ( Heaven is Closed and Re-Collecting ASTORoids ). She created works in nearly every genre, including pieces for the Australian Chamber Orchestra, all major Australian Symphony Orchestras as well as operas for Komische Oper Berlin, Opera Australia, and Philharmonie Luxembourg. Her operas have been performed in the opera houses of Zurich, Stuttgart, Antwerp, Bern, and Graz, among others. Kats-Chernin collaborated with many celebrated artists such as the theatre director Barrie Kosky, choreographer Meryl Tankard, virtuoso clarinettist Michael Collins, as well as a concert pianist and radio presenter Tamara-Anna Cislowska. She also wrote soundtracks to five feature-length silent films for ZDF/arte. One of the more recent such projects, a 90-minute score for Variete , premiered live at the film by the Belgian National Orchestra and became the basis for her violin concerto Fantasie im Wintergarten for the soloist Emily Sun and the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra. Her music featured at the opening ceremonies of the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games and the 2003 Rugby World Cup and she received many awards for her works. Her RussianRag was used asMax's theme in the 2009 claymation Mary and Max by Oscar-winning director Adam Elliot and she wrote a score (performed by the ACO, soprano Jane Sheldon and composer) for his 2024 award-winning and Academy Award- nominated claymation feature Memoir of a Snail. Her piece Eliza Aria from the concert suite Wild Swans (originally for the Australian Ballet) served as a chart-topping jingle for a UK bank from2007 till 2013. Renowned pianist Lang Lang included it in his album Piano Book . CABRILLO FESTIVAL OF CONTEMPORARY MUSIC 2026