2026 Program Guide | Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music

38 CABRILLO FESTIVAL OF CONTEMPORARY MUSIC 2026 ON FREEDOM PROGRAM NOTES AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL? VIVIAN FUNG (B. 1975) [World Premiere | Festival Commission] This work was commissioned to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. The Festival requested that I compose this work in response to The Star-Spangled Banner , which spurred on a flood of emotions. I hold a deep love for the United States—it is the land where I pursued my post-secondary education and made the decision to raise my family. It has undoubtedly been a land of opportunity for me. However, alongside my feelings of gratitude, there are also waves of disappointment and anger. I am greatly disheartened by the resurgence of xenophobia, racism, and misogyny being expressed across this great nation after years of progress. I have tried to capture these seemingly contradictory reactions in this action-packed, five-minute work. The work includes selected quotes from The Star-Spangled Banner , starting off quite noticeably in the opening phrase. Then, a cacophony of quotations from various anthems illustrates the convergence of my heritages—American, Chinese, and Canadian —resulting in a clashing and noisy interplay. Three additional quotations express some of my sentiments: “And the rockets red glare,” “the bombs bursting in air,” and the final euphoric climax of the piece, “O’er the land of the free.” Ultimately, the piece concludes with a questioning “America the Beautiful?,” prompting us to contemplate our complex yet profound experiment in democracy. — VIVIAN FUNG CONCERTO FOR CLARINET AND ORCHESTRA PEDRO EMANUEL PEREIRA (B. 1990) [World Premiere | Festival Commission] This concerto was conceived as an act of ontological resistance: not against the loss of meaning, but against a growing inability to recognize it. The problem is not that values have disappeared, but that distraction has distanced us from them. What remains is no longer seen. While maintaining a classical four-movement structure, the work transforms that architecture into a trajectory that directly confronts this condition. The first movement, The Fall , draws on the Genesis narrative as a figure of rupture. The music is organized through a rigorous formal logic, shaped by contrapuntal density and harmonic tension. Within this order, something gives way. The clarinet moves between belonging and distance, like a consciousness no longer aligned with the place it inhabits. The secondmovement, Babel , shifts this rupture into the collective sphere. The orchestra speaks. Multiple languages overlap, not to communicate, but to saturate the space. Speech multiplies until it loses function. The result is not complexity, but disintegration. The third movement, David’s Harp , introduces a reversal. The music withdraws from exteriority and enters a state of exposure. Lament is not an expressive effect, but a condition. Language no longer asserts itself, but turns toward something beyond it. The orchestra ceases to fragment and begins to converge. The fourthmovement, Pentecost , does not resolve, but transforms. Earliermaterials return under a different logic. Multiplicity no longer divides. It begins to coexist. What was unstable finds function within a broader whole. Throughout the work, the clarinet emerges as a voice seeking orientation within a collective body. The concerto does not offer answers. But it refuses the idea that everything has been lost. Instead, it proposes that what remains demands to be heard again. — PEDRO EMANUEL PEREIRA HAPPY BIRTHDAY FOR NEW ORLEANS JAZZ BAND ROBERT HUGHES (1933–2022) A quintet for clarinet, trumpet, trombone, tuba (or double bass) and percussion, this party piece was composed in 1966 to accompany a film for children titled That’s Me that ran about twice the length as this renamed excerpt. The film was produced by Amazing Life Games in Sausalito under the supervision of the educator Ethel Young, who developed the experimental Multi-Cultural project to bring together middle and lower-income students in pre- kindergarten and kindergarten classes. The three part structure opens with a rather sleepy introduction to Happy Birthday steered by the clarinetist into a wild honky-tonk solo. A birthday party with dancing follows; and a rousing reprise of Happy Birthday concludes the festivities. Bob Hughes (1933–2022), a co-founder of the Cabrillo Music Festival, came to Aptos in January of 1961 to study with a hermetic Lou Harrison. When Harrison left for a first trip to Asia at the end of March, Bob joined forces with Vic and Sidney Jowers, who, as owners of the restaurant-café the Sticky Wicket, were his employers (he was dishwasher) and his landlord (he lived next door). The Jowers were amenable to the idea of expanding the café’s offerings to include a chamber concert series and summer theater with music. The series lasted two seasons, with Bob advising, conducting, writing incidental music for theater, playing bassoon, and occasionally presenting his own compositions and arrangements. Harrison returned in July to a find himself at the center of a community of musicians and an enthusiastic audience for his music. When Cabrillo College opened its new campus and theater, the series developed into the Festival, with its first season in 1963—just in time, as the café would close the following year to make way for a new freeway ramp. —MARGARET FISHER