Music Center Recital Hall

Address
400 McHenry Road
Santa Cruz, CA 95064 Get Directions

Events at this venue

Today

  • Close-up view of musicians' hands playing trumpets. Focus on the foreground.

    UCSC Jazz Combos

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

    UCSC Jazz Combos present a spring quarter concert

    Free – $12

  • Chamber Music Concert with UCSC Music Ensembles —Percussion, Celtic, Classical Guitar, Horns, Central Asian, Experimental

    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 – UCSC Affiliates only – Open seating (no ticket required). – Doors are scheduled to open 30 minutes prior to event start […]

    FREE

  • grad student

    D.M.A. Student 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 Concert Choir

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

    UCSC Concert Choir

    Free – $12

  • ABC Ensemble and This Never Happened—April in Santa Cruz

    April in Santa Cruz Festival of Creative Music 2026 (AiSC)
    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 Orchestra

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

    UCSC Orchestra

    Free – $12

  • Percussionist Christopher Clarino—April in Santa Cruz

    April in Santa Cruz Festival of Creative Music 2026 (AiSC)
    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

  • Landesman Lecture

    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

  • Pianist Keisuke Nakagoshi—April in Santa Cruz

    April in Santa Cruz Festival of Creative Music 2026 (AiSC)
    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

  • Emeriti Faculty Lecture, Spring 2026

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

    As the West Coast exploded with the Summer of Love and Vietnam War protests, the Center for World Music’s concept of “bimusicality” brought Asian performance masters and American avant-gardists to train American students. Join Distinguished Research Professor Emerita Kathy Foley for the Spring Emeriti Lecture.

    FREE and open to the public

  • Student Recital—Maddison Ramirez, soprano

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

    Maddison Ramirez, soprano, presents their Bachelor of Music (B.M.) recital, with music from Renaissance, Romantic, and Modern eras. Accompanied by Luke Shepherd, piano; Faith Lanam, harpsichord, Denali Zia, cello, and various additional vocalists. Download and share the event flyer here. — ADMISSION – Attend in person at the Music Center Recital Hall at UC Santa […]

    FREE and open to the public
  • 2026 History of Science Lecture

    History of Science Lecture with Jennifer Derr

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

    The damming of the Nile River transformed agriculture and human health in 20th-century Egypt. While dams enabled year-round irrigation and provided hydroelectricity, the prevalence of parasitic disease also skyrocketed. Professor Derr explores the effects of damming the Nile on the health of Egyptians and the impact of large-scale environmental transformation on the knowledge and practice that made medicine during the 20th century.

    FREE and open to the public