San Francisco Contemporary Music Players Present - Mainstage Concert #1: “Bay Bridges”
October 3, 2026 @7:30PM
Brava Theatre Center
SAN FRANCISCO (September 2, 2026) – San Francisco Contemporary Music Players opens its 2026–27 concert season, LUMINOUS REFRACTIONS, on Saturday, October 3, at 7:30 p.m. at Brava Theater with Bay Bridges, a program devoted to composers who live and work in the Greater Bay Area, together with one composer who played an important role in shaping the region’s celebrated new-music tradition.
The five works on Bay Bridges offer a glimpse into the Bay Area’s vibrant creative network - a community in which ideas travel, traditions evolve, and artists influence one another across generations.
Around the world, the San Francisco Bay Area is synonymous with innovation. Today, the region is perhaps best known as a global center for technology and entrepreneurship, but it has also long been a fertile ground for groundbreaking developments in music. While the psychedelic counterculture of the 1960s may have captured more headlines, composers such as Henry Cowell, Harry Partch, Lou Harrison, Terry Riley, and John Adams have been equally influential in shaping the course of American music. Bay Bridges explores the continuation of this pioneering tradition through the work of composers who make—or have made - the Greater Bay Area their home.
In addition to being composers, all four living artists represented on the program are educators, underscoring the important role that teaching plays in sustaining and renewing the Bay Area’s musical community across generations. Matthew Evan Taylor teaches at UC Berkeley; Shuying Li at Sacramento State University; and Inés Thibaut at CSU East Bay. Michael Gilbertson is currently on the faculty of Boston Conservatory at Berklee and previously taught at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and San Francisco State University.
The program’s fifth composer, Darius Milhaud, came to the United States in 1940 after fleeing Nazi-occupied France. He settled in Oakland and joined the faculty of Mills College, where he taught for more than three decades and exerted a profound influence on generations of American composers. Milhaud was also a member of the founding faculty of the Music Academy of the West. His presence on Bay Bridges provides a historical link between the Bay Area’s pioneering musical past and the creative community that continues to flourish here today.
The program will be preceded – at 6:45 PM – by the popular “Under the Hood” pre-concert talk featuring Artistic Director Eric Dudley with guest composers.
Additional info is available at https://sfcmp.org
Tickets are available via City Box Office:
https://www.cityboxoffice.com/eventperformances.asp?evt=3334.
Subscriptions are currently on sale and single tickets will become available on September 14, 2026.
Around the world, the San Francisco Bay Area is synonymous with innovation. Today, the region is perhaps best known as a global center for technology and entrepreneurship, but it has also long been a fertile ground for groundbreaking developments in music. While the psychedelic counterculture of the 1960s may have captured more headlines, composers such as Henry Cowell, Harry Partch, Lou Harrison, Terry Riley, and John Adams have been equally influential in shaping the course of American music. Bay Bridges explores the continuation of this pioneering tradition through the work of composers who make—or have made - the Greater Bay Area their home.
In addition to being composers, all four living artists represented on the program are educators, underscoring the important role that teaching plays in sustaining and renewing the Bay Area’s musical community across generations. Matthew Evan Taylor teaches at UC Berkeley; Shuying Li at Sacramento State University; and Inés Thibaut at CSU East Bay. Michael Gilbertson is currently on the faculty of Boston Conservatory at Berklee and previously taught at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and San Francisco State University.
The program’s fifth composer, Darius Milhaud, came to the United States in 1940 after fleeing Nazi-occupied France. He settled in Oakland and joined the faculty of Mills College, where he taught for more than three decades and exerted a profound influence on generations of American composers. Milhaud was also a member of the founding faculty of the Music Academy of the West. His presence on Bay Bridges provides a historical link between the Bay Area’s pioneering musical past and the creative community that continues to flourish here today.
The program will be preceded – at 6:45 PM – by the popular “Under the Hood” pre-concert talk featuring Artistic Director Eric Dudley with guest composers.
Additional info is available at https://sfcmp.org
Tickets are available via City Box Office:
https://www.cityboxoffice.com/eventperformances.asp?evt=3334.
Subscriptions are currently on sale and single tickets will become available on September 14, 2026.
CONCERT PROGRAM
MATTHEW EVAN TAYLOR Pursuit (2016)
SHUYING LI Migration (2021) - West Coast Premiere
INÉS THIEBAUT apeiron (2025) - West Coast Premiere
MICHAEL GILBERTSON Breath and Shadow (2011)
DARIUS MILHAUD Stanford Serenade (1971)