When singer and sound artist Bora Yoon started work on The Wind of Two Koreas — her first piece for orchestra without amplification, electronics, or voice — she was responding to a graduate school prompt to be “as different as you can possibly be from yourself,” she told me in a video call. A departure from her solo electroacoustic work, the piece was performed last year at the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, a new-music enthusiast’s dream destination in Santa Cruz, Calif., that for 62 years has distinguished itself among summer festivals for its exclusive focus on living composers.
Yoon is returning to Cabrillo this year, which runs July 29 to August 11, as one of 15 composers in residence working with Cristian Măcelaru, the festival’s music director since 2017. Her new piece PARHELION, one of four world premieres, was commissioned for Cabrillo’s inaugural Creative Lab, an initiative designed to give creative independence to the composer. Scheduled for August 10 on a program with Gabriella Smith’s Lost Coast, the new piece will allow Yoon to enhance the experience of live orchestral music by adding amplification, lighting design, audio and video playback, spatial placement of the acoustic instruments, visuals designed by Joshue Ott, and Yoon’s mostly wordless live vocals, with snippets of Rilke. “I actually wrote myself into it,” she said, “so this is a true Bora Yoon orchestration.”
Bora Yoon — Photo by Bret Hartman
PARHELION uses the distinctive soundscapes of Yoon’s multimedia project ((PHONATION)), which consists of vocals, phasing metronomes, Tibetan bowls, assorted found objects, and live video manipulation. With her electro-acoustic sound tapestries in mind, Yoon designed the piece specifically for the Civic Auditorium, where all the concerts take place. The work is divided into five movements that are dramaturgically organized by a hexagram from the I Ching and conceptually inspired by Walter De Maria’s The Lightning Field, a land art piece in New Mexico where Yoon saw a parhelion: bright spots around the sun caused by diffraction. “It’s a metaphor for the scale of light, atmosphere, and resonance,” she said. “And how all these weather systems and factors need to align for an optical phenomenon like that.”
Cabrillo 2024 also includes the world premiere of Casting the Dice by Iván Enrique Rodríguez, a composer who unflinchingly confronts topical controversies through a late-Romantic musical lens. Rodríguez was born in Caguas, Puerto Rico to a family of non-musicians, but in 12th grade, a performance of Mahler’s third symphony “changed my life,” he told me over video. Today, his music is influenced by Mahler, Strauss, and Bruckner as much as his identity as a gay immigrant composer.
One of his older orchestral pieces, A Metaphor for Power, was premiered by the New Jersey Symphony and Măcelaru in 2019 as part of the Edward T. Cone Composition Institute — the same initiative through which Yoon’s The Wind of Two Koreas was performed. Măcelaru then selected Metaphor for Cabrillo, where it was performed in 2022. The original title, White is a Metaphor for Power, after James Baldwin, was shortened to soften the blow, but the work is still a forceful tone poem written with George Floyd and other victims of police brutality in mind, Rodríguez told me. “Even though we know that the United States has a very big problem with racism, sometimes things happen in culture very separated from us, and this really pulled me in, as something that happened to my people and could happen to me.”
Iván Enrique Rodriguez — Photo by Alexander Sargent
For the world premiere of Casting the Dice, commissioned by Cabrillo, Rodríguez is making his point more directly by adding narration, which he will perform over most of the 15-minute piece. The text was assembled from the flood of anonymous responses to a social media ad that he placed, calling for personal stories from immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers. “I wish it could be performed in a lot of different places, not necessarily because every composer wants a high-profile performance, but because of the stories,” Rodríguez said. “I crafted the narrative in a way general enough so it can be relatable, and also so that it says the things that need to be said regarding the experience of someone that’s going through a lot just to have a better life.”
The August 3 program also includes the world premiere of Nathaniel Heyder’s unbound: Phase 1, a short piece commissioned by Cabrillo. Heyder started composing the orchestral piece, his first, during the last two months of his graduate studies at Juilliard, he told me in an email. It was a time fraught with the anxiety that comes from transitioning out of school, but with the new freedom of being “unbound from previous artistic constraints.” The day after Heyder’s premiere is the relaunch of Cabrillo’s free Family Concert featuring VIBE, an interactive orchestral work by returning composer Greg Smith.
The fourth Cabrillo world premiere, on the August 2 program, is Karim Al-Zand’s Al Hakawati, which consists of fragments from an opera still in progress “about the true origins of the so-called ‘Arabian Nights’,” Al-Zand wrote in an email. The vocal parts, which will be performed by soprano Miriam Khalil, are culled from the opera’s sections for the three principal female characters. Stories from across time and place are linked by those segments, according to Al-Zand — from the present day to France’s ancien régime period to the imaginary world of the storyteller Scheherazade.
Karim Al-Zand — Courtesy of Artist
Between Heyder and Rodríguez comes the West Coast premiere of Lembit Beecher’s Tell Me Again, a cello concerto for his wife, Karen Ouzounian. Beecher grew up close to Santa Cruz and has been going to Cabrillo most of his life. He participated in the workshops in 2006; this will be the first time his music is featured on a main program. Commissioned by the Orlando Philharmonic in 2021, the 25-minute concerto was “inspired by the stories and songs that Karen and I grew up with in our respective Armenian-Lebanese-Canadian and Estonian-American families,” he told me in an email. “It tries to capture the way that stories of migration and origin are passed through generations, acquiring new meaning over time.”
Also among the nine West Coast premieres – which include works by Errollyn Wallen, Vivian Fung, Clarice Assad, Daniel Kellogg, and Wynton Marsalis – is the sparkling and agitated Violin Concerto by Helen Grime. It will be performed on August 2 by the new-music specialist Leila Josefowicz, who has played it since 2022, “completely inhabit[ing] the character of the piece,” Grime commented in an email. The same evening, Nina C. Young, a faculty member leading the composers’ workshop, presents the West Coast premiere of Tread softly, one of the pieces from the New York Philharmonic’s Project 19 commissioning program, celebrating the centennial of the 19th Amendment.
A very different kind of celebration was Beethoven’s 250th anniversary in 2020; for the occasion, Pierre Jalbert’s Passage was commissioned by the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. It receives its West Coast premiere at Cabrillo August 11 on a program with Juan Pablo Contreras’ Mariachitlán. The work is in three contrasting movements that respond to different aspects of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 4. “Many of these passages were simply starting points and evolved into new and unique musical material,” wrote the composer. “My hope is that more orchestras will take up the work, especially paired with [the Beethoven], so the audiences can hear connections to the past with a thoroughly modern piece of our own time.”
Pierre Jalbert — Courtesy of Artist
Each piece gets two or three rehearsals, with the composers working with Măcelaru and Cabrillo’s enviable pickup orchestra to hash out all the elements of performance that can make or break a composition. “There’s a great sense of discovery as the rehearsals unfold, where everyone is figuring out how they fit into the whole,” said Jalbert, who first attended Cabrillo in 2010 for a performance of his piece In Aeternam. “It’s always nerve-racking at first, but seeing and hearing the final product gives such a sense of fulfillment and gratitude.”
As for Yoon, “I think a performance is great when there’s a tingle,” she told me. “When it’s working and the heart is in the right place and you’re circulating the energy of the room – I think that’s what music’s about.”
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