• Pianist Keisuke Nakagoshi—April in Santa Cruz

    Music Center Recital Hall 400 McHenry Road, Santa Cruz, CA

    Pianist Keisuke Nakagoshi graces UC Santa Cruz’s Music Center Recital Hall with Rippling, Resistance, and Rain, a unique concert of 21st century piano music written by composers from Japan and the United States. The program opens with an imaginative fantasy of a bird, explores the psychology of addiction and mental illness, explores a liberating sense […]

    FREE and open to the public
  • Landesman Lecture

    Music Center Recital Hall 400 McHenry Road, Santa Cruz, CA
    Hybrid Event

    This evening blends science, poetry, and storytelling to explore our deepest origins and shared humanity. Tracing the cosmic formation of the elements that make our bodies, we reflect on an ancestry older than nations, borders, and labels. Through verse and story, we connect stellar history with lived experience, inviting us to see how our many identities arise from the same ancestral matter. Together, we explore how storytelling can soften divisions, cross boundaries, and remind us that we are forged from one common origin.

    FREE and open to the public
  • Percussionist Christopher Clarino—April in Santa Cruz

    Music Center Recital Hall 400 McHenry Road, Santa Cruz, CA

    Join percussionist Christopher Clarino in a concert of revolutionary work that invites listeners of all kinds to rethink hearing itself. This concert features a wide range of pieces—some well known and others newly commissioned—that explore sound, language, and gesture through electronics, field recordings, text, and American Sign Language (ASL). Framed in dialogue with these premieres […]

    FREE and open to the public
  • UCSC Orchestra

    Music Center Recital Hall 400 McHenry Road, Santa Cruz, CA

    UCSC Orchestra

    Free – $12
  • Music on the Meadow—April in Santa Cruz

    Music Center Recital Hall 400 McHenry Road, Santa Cruz, CA

    Music On The Meadow (MOTM) presents “Episode 0: Music with the Meadow.” MOTM showcases engagement from students, artists, scientists, scholars, and culture bearers, who engage in “listening with the meadow” through genre-defying works. MOTM is a site for low-key (but not low-quality or low-impact) celebration, gathering, mourning, remembering, rethinking, unlearning. This event is presented as […]

    FREE and open to the public
  • UCSC Wind Ensemble

    Music Center Recital Hall 400 McHenry Road, Santa Cruz, CA

    UCSC Wind Ensemble concert

    Free – $12
  • ABC Ensemble and This Never Happened—April in Santa Cruz

    Music Center Recital Hall 400 McHenry Road, Santa Cruz, CA

    Pianists/experimentalists Amy Beal and Ben Carson, and friends in the This Never Happened Ensemble, present a concert of toys, noise, open-questions, and a love of play, including one piece involving no fewer than five concert grand pianos. Featuring the music of Shanna Sordahl, Marc Perez, Mexican composer Rodrigo Barriga Lopez, and legendary experimentalists Johanna Beyer […]

    FREE and open to the public
  • UCSC Concert Choir

    Music Center Recital Hall 400 McHenry Road, Santa Cruz, CA

    UCSC Concert Choir

    Free – $12
  • DMA Recital—Maisha Lani

    Music Center Recital Hall 400 McHenry Road, Santa Cruz, CA

    Graduate student Maisha Lani debuts new compositions composed over the course of two years in the D.M.A. Music Composition program at UC Santa Cruz. The pieces range in instrumentation and style: from a blues to a post-tonal work, consisting of vibraphone and stringed instruments, to afrobeat inspired compositions, to graphic scores and improvisation. Audiences are […]

    FREE and open to the public
  • UCSC Opera—Orpheus in the Underworld

    UCSC Opera—Orpheus in the Underworld
    Music Center Recital Hall 400 McHenry Road, Santa Cruz, CA

    A rollicking and irreverent spoof of the Orpheus myth, Jacques Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld is most famous as the origin of the “gallop infernal”—the music now strongly associated with the can-can dance. This operetta follows the unhappy (and unfaithful) union of Orpheus and Eurydice, as the latter’s love affair with the god of the […]

  • UCSC Opera—Orpheus in the Underworld

    UCSC Opera—Orpheus in the Underworld
    Music Center Recital Hall 400 McHenry Road, Santa Cruz, CA

    A rollicking and irreverent spoof of the Orpheus myth, Jacques Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld is most famous as the origin of the “gallop infernal”—the music now strongly associated with the can-can dance. This operetta follows the unhappy (and unfaithful) union of Orpheus and Eurydice, as the latter’s love affair with the god of the […]

  • UCSC Opera—Orpheus in the Underworld

    UCSC Opera—Orpheus in the Underworld
    Music Center Recital Hall 400 McHenry Road, Santa Cruz, CA

    A rollicking and irreverent spoof of the Orpheus myth, Jacques Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld is most famous as the origin of the “gallop infernal”—the music now strongly associated with the can-can dance. This operetta follows the unhappy (and unfaithful) union of Orpheus and Eurydice, as the latter’s love affair with the god of the […]

  • UCSC Opera—Orpheus in the Underworld

    UCSC Opera—Orpheus in the Underworld
    Music Center Recital Hall 400 McHenry Road, Santa Cruz, CA

    A rollicking and irreverent spoof of the Orpheus myth, Jacques Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld is most famous as the origin of the “gallop infernal”—the music now strongly associated with the can-can dance. This operetta follows the unhappy (and unfaithful) union of Orpheus and Eurydice, as the latter’s love affair with the god of the […]

  • UCSC Chamber Music Concert

    Music Center Recital Hall 400 McHenry Road, Santa Cruz, CA

    Audiences are invited to a free spring quarter chamber music concert featuring a variety of student ensembles. — ADMISSION – Attend in person at the Music Center Recital Hall at UC Santa Cruz – Free and open to the public. – Open seating (no ticket required). – Doors are scheduled to open 30 minutes prior […]

    FREE and open to the public
  • UCSC Jazz Combos

    Music Center Recital Hall 400 McHenry Road, Santa Cruz, CA

    UCSC Jazz Combos present a spring quarter concert

    Free – $12
  • UCSC Jazz Big Band

    Music Center Recital Hall 400 McHenry Road, Santa Cruz, CA

    UCSC Jazz Big Band

    Free – $12
  • UCSC Central Asian Ensemble

    Music Center Recital Hall 400 McHenry Road, Santa Cruz, CA

    UCSC Central Asian Ensemble concert

    FREE and open to the public