After the stagnant 30-minute concert-closing piece by Sarah Hennies at the 2026 Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, I felt nothing but pity for the orchestra and outrage for my fellow audience members. This was not the programming that had, in the past, propelled the Festival to thrilling heights.
It was a tedious, mind-numbing exercise in acoustical terrorism. We were held hostage by a performance narcissist who misused the skill and expertise of a large orchestra to proclaim her hatred of the current social landscape. The effect was excruciatingly dull.
So insulting to orchestra and audience alike was the irritating, seemingly uncomposed piece, that most of us enduring its performance on Saturday August 1 were physically numb when the sequence of sounds finally stopped. Hennies admitted that the piece was created through free association. A sonic tantrum guided by the perpetrator’s unconscious.
The visual arts have long been weaponized in the name of de-skilling, of eradicating anything that smacks of beauty or training or mastery. In the name of radical inclusion, gone is the encouragement of pride and enjoyment that comes with learning new skills, practicing those skills and polishing them to new expertise.
Post-modernism, with its insistent rejection of narrative arc, its self-congratulatory reverse snobbery, is, in the words of Millennials, so yesterday. Hennies’ anti-classical approach has been done and done. It takes new music nowhere. It reaches for nothing beyond its own self-absorption. A swamp of self-help disguised as originality.
Hennies’ soul-deadening half hour illustrated that the colonization of art by narcissism has a disturbing grip on the world of contemporary music. Or at least the music increasingly programmed by the once-provocative and exciting Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music.
Having read Hennies’ background and interviews with her in national publications, I agree that she sounded good on paper. But did anyone actually listen to her work? Did anyone think to vet the piece—I won’t call it music—that was presented during the second night of the Festival?
Long passages of barely audible wooden sticks lightly drawn across the strings of violins. Long, long passages. The occasional gong. The odd drum here and there. The repeated phrases of noise that went on for what felt like eternities. Thirty minutes of hostility. Thirty trivial minutes.
Here was work aggressively expanding the frontiers of mediocrity. What we heard was a loosely strategized tantrum flung in our faces by a self-absorbed poseur trying to find herself at public expense.
I applaud any and all efforts by inquiring individuals to find themselves. Surely the pursuit of self-knowledge can be worthwhile, but not at the expense of authentic artistry.
Yes, there is worthy new music being composed. For example, Norwegian composer Nils Asheim has scored folk language practices of the Northern Sami into a haunting piece for choir and string orchestra, performed in Carmel at the Bach Festival a month ago.
That same Festival offered a profound Nuits, Adieux written 30 years ago by Kaija Saariaho, involving choral ensembles, each singer with two microphones amplifying and processing their sounds at non-synchronous intervals. The effect was staggering, beautiful, mysterious, and utterly fresh in its overall impression. Again new music rife with imaginative processions of sounds and words. A piece designed to open minds rather than shut ears.
The Cabrillo Festival has been known to present compositional work that stretches the exceptional abilities of its orchestra. What went wrong here? Why fail to specialize in musical ideas that push the frontiers beyond any single individual’s wants, needs, and issues?
Can we blame COVID? Or the retirement two years ago of savvy Executive Director Ellen Primack who had finessed a programming structure that made us all proud? Hard to tell, but the word “community” was repeated many more times than the word “creativity” in the introductions to the evening’s program by current Executive Director Riley Nicholson.
Is community now the primary goal of a once adventurous new music Festival? What happened to provocative? Or the mission of bringing the most exciting and skilled new composers to the Festival?
In the words of one regional music director, last night’s final hour was “torture.”
