2026 Program Guide | Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music

50 CABRILLO FESTIVAL OF CONTEMPORARY MUSIC 2026 CONTROL PROGRAM NOTES KONTROL CLARICE V. ASSAD (B. 1978) [World Premiere | Festival Commission] KONTROL imagines a near future in which a composer demonstrates aneural interface chip toa liveaudience showcasing a symphonic orchestra and a soloist. The app, called KONTROL, connects to implanted chips in orchestral musicians, giving the composer remote command over how they play. The piece opens with a product pitch: a pre-recorded interview with the violinist, a slick AI-narrated commercial. Then she walks onstage, opens the application, and the demonstration begins. What follows is equal parts product launch and slow unravelling. KONTROL can change tempo, style, pitch, groove. I can make the orchestra jazzy, spooky, robotic, transcendent. It works beautifully. Until it doesn't. The piece asks a question it refuses to answer cleanly: at what point does augmentation become replacement? And if the system eventually runs without you—plays the music, controls the musicians, no longer needs your hand on the screen—was that always the plan, or did something go wrong? — CLARICE ASSAD DEFENDING GREENWOOD JACKSON A. WATERS (B. 2001) [West Coast Premiere] Defending Greenwood is a programmatic work following the events of the nearly forgotten Tulsa Race Massacre in 1921. Considered to be "the single worst incident of racial violence in American history," the Tulsa Race Massacre occurred in Greenwood, Oklahoma, also known as "Black Wall Street," for being one of the most economically thriving black towns in America. A prospering city was destroyed due to a false scandal. After a black teenager was accused of assaulting a white woman in an elevator, the white community in Tulsa raged. Law enforcement and white rioters decimated Greenwood and the residents living there. Each movement depicts the days surrounding the event. Mvt. II - May 31, 1921 Newspapers published a confrontation between black and white armed mobs around the courthouse. He was arrested, and black World War I vets rushed to the courthouse to prevent a lynching. Shots were fired and the outnumbered Black residents began retreating to the Greenwood District. Mvt. III - June 1, 1921 Early in the morning, white rioters launched an assault on Greenwood. They shut down the phone systems, and the railway, removing access for the Red Cross to assist. Airplanes were flown above where rifles were fired and bombs were dropped, hitting buildings and people. White rioters burned houses and businesses, and many focused on killing all the Black residents they could see. Victims recall running outside of their house and passing dead bodies. My great-grandfather experienced the Tulsa Race Massacre firsthand. Growing up with a black mom invested in sharing her history, the first time I heard about it was through her when I was finishing high school. Defending Greenwood is a promise I made to do what I can to use my voice and shed light onto silenced history, especially when history is being removed before our eyes — JACKSON A. WATERS SPIN HANNAH ISHIZAKI (B. 2000) [West Coast Premiere] In our initial conversation about writing Spin , Maestro Manfred Honeck shared that February is the month of dance in Vienna. This conjured the image of a Viennese waltz, with dancers in sync, beautifully stretching time as the music plays with the sensation of gravity, pulling them to step in perfect rhythm. In Spin , the stretching of time present in the Viennese waltz is taken to extremes through the integration of another genre that shares a gravitational pull toward movement—electronic dance music (EDM). Through glitching, rapid timbral shifts, and a strong sense of pulse, EDM pushes and pulls the listener across shifting sound worlds. In Spin , the influences of Viennese waltz and EDM collide and intertwine. The piece unfolds in three sections: a wonky, glitch-heavy waltz; a section centered on melodies in the bass instruments; and a final, more stable return of the waltz. At times, a solo instrument emerges from the orchestral texture to help suspend time and create a feeling of stillness. The title Spin references both the swirling motion of the Viennese waltz and the revolving turntables of EDM DJs. — HANNAH ISHIZAKI CONCERTO FOR ORCHESTRA DAN DEDIU (B. 1967) [U.S. Premiere] Conceived in three movements, the Concerto for Orchestra begins with a gestural theme of the violins in unison, alternating an incisive passage of woodwinds and percussion. An otherworldly intervention by the vibraphone brings a three-note sound rune that will permeate the entire architecture of the concerto. Immediately after, a diatonic lyrical surface in the ethos of C major follows, full of interstitial canons and polyphonies, leading to a majestic appearance of a spatialized four-note rune, in a transposition of the B.A.C.H. melogram, that is, B-flat-A-C-B. Next follows a transition of the woodwind instruments, which engage in polyphonic dialog and overlap with the interventions of the vibraphone, sibilant and restrained. The same diatonic surface then returns a semitone lower (on B) in a minor ethos, culminating once again with the chanting of the B.A.C.H. motif. All these sound surfaces are punctuated by an enigmatic matrix chord, which intervenes like an obsessive guardian and pokes at the entire narrative path by returning to the same gesture, like an unappeasable memento mori. The end of the first movement brings back the incisive,