KALX DJ Velvet Einstein interviews composer Vivian Fung and D. Riley Nicholson, Executive Director of this year’s Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music. Interview was originally broadcast on June 11, 2026.
Velvet Einstein: I’m very excited to be joined by Vivian Fung and D. Riley Nicholson of the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music and we’re gonna talk to them in just a few short moments. But to get you excited and in the mood, let’s have a listen to Vivian Fung’s Earworms.
musical excerpt
Velvet Einstein: Little bit of Earworms here from Vivian Fung, composer, and who has a special piece as part of the Cabrillo Festival of Music this year. Very excited to be joined by her, along with D. Riley Nicholson, to talk about the upcoming festival. And the theme this year is We the Dreamers. And Riley, you’re the executive director for the festival this year. So maybe we can start with you in, in talking a little bit about that theme and, and what people can look forward to hearing and experiencing.
Riley Nicholson: Yeah. Thanks for having me. So our festival runs July 27th through August 9th, and this season, as the title implies, we are commemorating the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, but in a way that really is thinking about a broad picture of American identity, and really confronting the fault lines between the ideal, the dreams of America, and the reality of what we’re living in. And we’re trying to present artists and organize our concerts in a way that allow us to think of and vision for the future, and, and dream.
Velvet Einstein: Wonderful. And, we’re joined by Vivian, so maybe we can talk a little bit about, like, her piece and, and Vivian, what, what you’ve put together for the festival.
Vivian Fung: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. So I’m very honored to be one of the composers in residence this year at Cabrillo, and I almost think of Cabrillo Festival as my family now, because this is, what, like, my third or fourth time being in residence at, at, at the Cabrillo Festival. And this year, I also have the special privilege of being on the faculty and working with the composer workshop, choosing three young composers, to workshop new pieces, the week before the opening concert.
Riley approached me back last year, you know, talking about his theme of this year’s festival, and then he posed a challenge for me to write a short piece, about four minutes, a response to our national anthem. And I thought that was gonna be a very daunting challenge, because, you know, of all people, he would ask me, who is actually, American, but Canadian-born and of Chinese ancestry.
But I think he made that deliberate choice. And I think, actually, I’m probably a perfect person to write this because I embody all the values of our American, society and our life, being an immigrant, but proudly holding the values of the American dream.
But of course, you know, the reaction is, challenging because we are living in fraught times. And so, there’s a combination of positive elements that, you know, I’m so grateful to be here in United States, but it’s also fraught with our recent political events now. So I try to capture all that in four minutes-in a very fast-paced and virtuosic, opener for this entire festival.
Velvet Einstein: Mm-hmm. And, and what, what are you… what sonically what were you going after there? Did you actually take the national anthem and, and tweak it, or is it from scratch?
Vivian Fung: Yeah. So I took certain lines from it. So theres, um, bombs…what was the line? Bursting in air ..yeah, yeah. Bombs in the air and, and then the land of the free was a very important one for me, and that was like the climax of the piece. So there are, like, maybe three or four quotations. There’s a quotation right at the beginning, and then it ends with a quote from America the Beautiful, but it’s posed as a question, and that is the title of the piece. America the Beautiful, question mark. Um, and then throughout, to just address my identity, there are quotations from the Chinese anthem and also the Canadian anthem.
Velvet Einstein: How wonderful. Cool.
Riley Nicholson: And, and yeah, I’m struck by your response and also musically I feel like one of the things you do so strongly throughout, like a through line that I hear in your work is you have this ability to weave together lots of different ideas. And so both musically and your actual identity…you know, choosing to be an American, you know, I think the weaving together of that is really powerful again both sort of musically, structurally, and personally, right? So it was, yes, a very intentional choice. And also there’s a lot of trust there.
With any commission, right, you’re giving kind of a blank slate. But also with this topic, it’s heavy, it’s big. A short piece, big topic, right? But, you know, as you mentioned, we’ve worked the Cabrillo Festival. It has a strong relationship with you over the years, and so there’s a lot of trust there that we have in you. And so here we are, and we’re so excited to bring it to life this summer.
Velvet Einstein: Great, yeah. So let’s talk a little bit about the other pieces that are, are coming out. So I know there’s a number of other commissions. What’s, what’s involved in this year?
Riley Nicholson: Yeah. Um, so we have Sarah Hennies. She is an East Coast composer and she is our creative lab artist, um, so writing a, a full 30-minute piece, a substantial work. We have, uh, Pedro Manuel Pereira, a Portuguese composer, who’s writing a clarinet concerto and the connection there is Cristian Măcelaru, our music director, has worked a lot with the clarinetist and Carlos Ferreira.
Carlos and Pedro are both from Portugal and have worked together a lot. So that’s how that came to be. And, um, and then we have our Emerging Black Composers project winner. And then we have Clarice Assad is doing a new commission called Control, which is about technology’s influence and control over us. And she’s cast herself as narrator, as CEO of this app and a mechanism that’s controlling the soloist and sort of puppeteering the conductor and orchestra. And of course, you know, it all goes wrong on purpose. You know, kind of exploring, how the control, over…technology’s control over us can kind of… has a dark underbelly sometimes. So, yeah, there’s a lot there.
Velvet Einstein: Cool. And then in terms of other pieces, so I guess there’s the West Coast premiere of the Philip Glass piece?
Riley Nicholson: Yes. That would- Right … could be considered the headliner. And that’s on opening night, the same night as Vivian’s commission.
Vivian Fung: Yeah, I’m opening for Philip Glass.
Riley Nicholson: [laughter] No big deal. All right. Yeah. That’s the second performance ever. Right after it, Boston is performing it at Tanglewood. Symphony Number 15 Lincoln which is with a bass baritone Zachary James. And he, the libretto, is Lincoln’s words, is Lincoln’s speeches. A big part of it is from the Lyceum Address, which was responding, kind of early in Lincoln’s career to right after a lynching. And it’s speaking to how the threats to democracy, paraphrasing of course here, but the threats to democracy are not from afar, but lawlessness and division within. Which feels so prescient…. you know. So it’s also very connected with our theme this year of, of America 250.
Velvet Einstein: Oh, great. And then in terms of the dates and the times, so there’s- it’s two weekends and then there’s also something coming up next week, correct?
Riley Nicholson: Yeah. You don’t have to wait all the way till, um, late July, early August. We have a special preview event and fundraiser at Bargetto Winery. We call it Taste of the Festival. So the idea there is it’s a taste of what’s to come. We do chamber music by composers who will be on our main stage season in the summer. So we’ll do selections of string quartets. It’ll be Friction Quartet, no strangers to the Bay Area, obviously, performing, string quartets by Vivian Fung, Clarice Assad, and Philip Glass.
Velvet Einstein: Oh, great. And then, so all this is, is down in, in Santa Cruz, correct?
Riley Nicholson: Yes. Yeah. Our main shows are at the Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium throughout. That’s our home for the summer season, but this preview event that I just mentioned will be at Bargetto Winery in SoCal.
Velvet Einstein: Okay. In terms of pulling together all the pieces, so we talked a little bit about you approaching Vivian. How did you approach, like, the other composers, and what was the guidance given to them?
Riley Nicholson: It’s kind of artistic planning Tetris. So it’s not one size fits all. We don’t approach all of our composers in the same way. And we don’t want everything to be on the nose. Some pieces, like obviously the, what we asked of Vivian was very specific. You know, freedom within that, but the prompt was very specific. Other composers, it might be more open-ended. And we don’t want, we don’t need everything to be super on the nose and it has to directly connect, but every concert has some sort of theme. So it’s a combination of artists that we’ve had on our radar and worked with for a long time.
We have composers who, our score review committee, which is comprised of our musicians, helps us look through scores of emerging and early career composers. And we have, through that vehicle, selected, Hannah Ishizaki’s Spin. And then we have, of course, you know, Cristian Măcelaru, our music director, is the artistic vision of the organization, so I’m helping him feed ideas, and he has ideas. So it’s a beautifully messy process.
Velvet Einstein: Wonderful. In terms of, of pulling in the Philip Glass piece, was that just serendipity that it tied in with the theme, or did you seek that out?
Riley Nicholson: A little bit. Um, ’cause I saw that, I knew that… Well, there’s a story there. The, the Kennedy Center, the National Symphony Orchestra was supposed to play it before. Well, they commissioned it. Um, and then I called his manager and I was like, “Wow, this would be perfect, but it’s probably under exclusivity.” So I called his manager and, and they said, “No, um, you can do it after the Kennedy Center. You know, it premieres at the Kennedy Center.” So we were the second performance.
Well, it got pulled from the Kennedy Center for obvious reasons, and you can look at Philip Glass’ statement on his site for his reasoning for that. But then because of that, you know…good for the piece. It got more awareness in the press, and there’s other partners that have come on board. So now it has a lineup of several orchestras that are playing it all around the world, of which we’re still the second. Um, so, yeah. That piece, that was a very specific kind of circumstance.
Velvet Einstein: Okay.
Riley Nicholson: And, uh, yeah…fraught.
Velvet Einstein: Yeah, yeah, it’s… Yeah, less we could say about the whole Kennedy Center thing…but I think that would take us off track here.
Riley Nicholson: Yeah. Not our purview. Yeah, yeah.
Velvet Einstein: Um, all right, well let’s have a listen to Vivian, one of your pieces right here that’s performed by Nicholas Phan. Do you wanna introduce this?
Vivian Fung: Yeah. Okay. I’ve had the great pleasure to work with Nick Phan. And, as you know, he’s based in San Francisco, but we worked on a project together actually in New York. This was a project quite special to both our hearts. It’s a project built around a poem entitled O, which is just the letter O, and it’s by an environmental poet by the name of Claire Walmingham, and she’s based in the Twin Cities, and she writes exclusively about our environment, so she’s really considered an environmental poet.
And so this poem goes that it’s all the words that begin with O to do as descriptors of our planet. You know, it could be animals, it could be body parts, it could be all these different things. But then it’s like, it’s like a, almost like a funeral because all these things are dying, and it’s like a, it’s a call to action.
And I was very taken with this poem, and so I decided to set it. And then Nick was also very much on board, and we got the Jasper Quartet, also partners, um, and one of Nick’s longtime pianist partners, Myra Huang. And then we approached the Kaufman Center. The Kaufman Center is based in New York, and they also have a high school affiliated with their center, and it’s called the Special Music School.
And it’s basically a high school where most of the students or all of the students have as the fundamental part of their curriculum: music. And so I got to work with the 10th grade English class, and they wrote reactions to Claire’s poetry. And so I chose three of the collective poems. There were maybe six collective poems that they did as a class, and I chose three of them and set it to music. These four movements comprise Lamenting Earth, which is the song cycle that I wrote for Nick, and is, which, um, he just released on an album called Lamenting Earth, which is a whole album of pieces about the environment.
Velvet Einstein: Okay, great. Let’s have a listen.
musical excerpt
Velvet Einstein: Music here, from composer Vivian Fung, who’s here with us in studio along with D. Riley Nicholson talking about the Cabrillo Festival of Music. And, yeah, we were just talking a little bit ago about the process and what’s involved here. So Vivian, I thought maybe we could start by having you talk a little bit about the creative process and what goes on at the festival.
Vivian Fung: Yeah. So, first of all, I wanted to say just because you faded out my piece. Just kidding. Um-
Velvet Einstein: [laughter] I asked for permission.
Vivian Fung: Yes. Yes, you did. So this track is available, actually it was just released in April, and it’s available on Avie Records. And then the album, again, is called Lamenting Earth, but you can also find it on Spotify. And it’s a beautiful album, and so wonderfully sung by Nick Phan. I think it’s just a wonderful collaboration. I hope that everybody checks it out.
Velvet Einstein: And, and we do have it here at KALX, so you can call and request it anytime.
Vivian Fung: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Or, or you can go to my website as well. It’s also posted there. But, as far as Cabrillo Festival, one of the things that I love about the Cabrillo Festival is the sense of community. So, of all the festivals I’ve been to, I would say that there is really a feeling of a community at the Cabrillo Festival. So instead of staying at hotels, first of all, you stay with, a resident of Santa Cruz.
And it just so happens that the first time I was invited to come to Cabrillo, I stayed with a very generous couple by the name of Dan and Nora, Dan McFadden and Nora Freeman, and we hit it off so well that I’ve been just friends with them ever since, and it just so happens that they’re also contributors to my commissioning.
Ao it’s like it has come full circle, and I’m so grateful to them just, for their support of my work, but also just as friends, you know? And, and that’s the beauty of the Cabrillo Festival is it’s like relationships like that. It’s not only between me and the musicians, but there’s a sense of the greater community.
The other thing is that, you know, all the rehearsals, or most of the rehearsals, are open and free to the general public. So you have a lot of people who live in Santa Cruz or even do not live in Santa Cruz, and they come in from the Bay Area or from even outside of the area, and they come, and they just sit in on the rehearsals, and it’s a wonderful thing to watch because you get a real sense of how a piece is put together by an orchestra.
And, you know, with all that, it kind of shaped my creative process when it came to composing the piece that I just described, America the Beautiful. All the musicians in the orchestra are there because they love new music. So this is also unique for Cabrillo is that it’s, it’s probably the only festival that I know of where an orchestra devotes their entire two weeks on living composers, and I don’t know of any other festival that does that.
And so everybody who’s in the orchestra, they’re there because they love that process of playing new music. And they come from all over the United States and they’re all top, top-rate performers who have regular jobs at orchestras, and they come, and for two weeks. We’re all gathered here together to go through the process of learning a new piece or an unfamiliar piece.
And most of the time, they’re pieces that are… have just been written or recently written and, and there’s, like, a whole crowd of people gathered together to listen to this, which is so amazing. So I find this to be a very, um… It’s like one of the only chances that we, as composers, get a spotlight, you know? And it’s, it’s such a thrilling thing to, to witness and to be a part of.
Velvet Einstein: And, and how far in advance are the, the musicians coming in to start the rehearsals?
Riley Nicholson: So they fly in somewhere around, like, 25th, 26th. First open rehearsal’s on the 27th of July and then we rehearse that first entire week, and then the first concert will be Friday, July 31st, which is Vivian’s piece… is opening the entire season.
So it’s a week of rehearsals, essentially. And, as Vivian mentioned, they’re all open and free to the public, and that’s very intentional. We’re really trying to remove the velvet rope, kind of, that’s inherent in the field and give access to the creative process, not just for the audiences, but also, as Vivian mentioned, like, a few, so few places, if any, in the world are so many composers in one place at one time.
So there’s this synergy of community building between artists, between audiences, that we try to be very intentional about. And also, we can, you know, reduce barriers by perhaps someone who can’t afford, you know, to come to our, our main stage ticketed show. They can come to a free open rehearsal.
And also, you know, with the canon works, we have the benefit of having heard them and studied them. You don’t have that benefit with a new piece. So through open rehearsals, you kind of can, right? You can kind of start to get that Earworm, and, um, and then by the… and have a relationship with the piece by the time it’s fully performed at the performance.
Vivian Fung: Yeah, and the reason why we are here in Berkeley is because I am living right maybe 10, 15 minutes away from the campus, and I live here. And I have students, actually, I’m inviting out to the festival, and they want to come because they’re there to witness all this and to be a part of the rehearsal process. And it’s so exciting, actually, to witness how a piece goes from its first rehearsal to, you know, the finished performance. And that whole thing is almost better than just witnessing the performance because you get to see how it’s all just put together. And I also want to mention one more thing is the educational component of the festival, and I think Christie is such a great teacher and also the idea that they’re also fostering multiple generations at a time.
So I am arriving actually a week before the opening night concert, and a part of the reason is because I’ll be on faculty at the composer workshop, which is a one-week program where we have chosen three composers, young composers, who are 30 and younger to be a part, a special part, of the week leading up to a workshop where you have not one, but two conductors performing each work of the students or the young composer.
And so it’s like a tie-in between- a relationship between young emerging conductors and young emerging composers, and it’s a perfect way because I’ve done it. I’ve actually seen firsthand the idea of this community…previous conducting fellows who have come through this program have gone on to perform my music elsewhere.
And in fact, the… I’m gonna be having my violin concerto performed this coming summer in Jakarta, and the conductor’s name is Rebecca Tong, and I first met her in 2018 as part of the Cabrillo Festival, which is so amazing for, for the synergy to happen, and now we’re very good friends.
So I guess the educational component is a huge part of it. You have the composer workshop, which I will lead, but you also have a conducting workshop, and maybe Riley can talk a little bit more about that, where I think there are six conductor fellows. Is that right?
Riley Nicholson: Six fellows. 20 conductors total, and six fellows that get the public performance.
Vivian Fung: Yeah, and Christie, it’s so amazing to watch workshops led by Christie because he sits in the back of the orchestra with a mic, and the conducting fellows or whoever’s on stage conducts an excerpt of a very well-known piece of the canon. And then Christie makes all these- these very, um, astute but not always friendly comments. And you know, you’re sitting there and you’re watching, but he’s so right because it’s, you know… there’s an automatic shift that happens, and it’s a great learning experience, and it’s one of my favorite things to do, actually, at the festival.
Velvet Einstein: So he’s sitting there, like, conducting the conductor, in a sense.
Vivian Fung: Yeah. It’s not only about the actual conducting, but it’s also about your gait, you know, as a conductor and how you are working with the musicians. You know, it’s a very interesting..it’s a very anthropological experience because you’re witnessing this human interaction, you know? That’s like microcosm of society, really.
Riley Nicholson: And fun fact, we’ll name drop. Elim Chan, the new SFS music director is an alumni.
Velvet Einstein: Oh.
Riley Nicholson: Yeah.
Vivian Fung: So we have all these community- … um, sort of branches that emerge from the Cabrillo experience, which is wonderful.
Velvet Einstein: Yeah. Wonderful. Coming back to the, the compositions then, so for like the new works with the living composers, how often are there actually changes made to the piece itself, like, as the rehearsals are going on? Does that happen?
Vivian Fung: Yeah, that happens. Okay. Um, and I think we have, like, two or three rehearsals. I, I forget. Uh- Three
Riley Nicholson: Three and a dress.
Vivian Fung: Three and a dress. whiwhich is a fair amount, and you can do a lot. But the thing is, I tell my students this too, you have to come prepared. So you have to know if there is something that really does not work out, you have to be prepared of what the alternate version is so that you’re there. Because there’s not enough time, and there’s, like, maybe 70, 80 musicians you’re working with at a given time, so you have to be prepared. Yeah.
Riley Nicholson: Mm. Yeah. And a lot of times it, it may just be errata, you know, like little mistakes or reprints, you know. So it, it can just- yeah … from small to, you know, larger. And that’s almost always the case with a new score. There’s things to chase down, you know, copying errors. Once I didn’t print the right bar lines and the musician … for a piece with me, not with Cabrillo. It was a horror story. And the orchestra was, “We have no bar lines.” Uh-oh.
Vivian Fung: Yeah, yeah, things like that. But yeah, I mean, I think, it’s wonderful … If you have time and, and it’s worth a trek to Santa Cruz. Who doesn’t wanna be in Santa Cruz along the beach in the summertime? So it’s, it’s … That’s why we’re here early, so that you, we can plan these things.
Velvet Einstein: Okay. Do you wanna remind our listeners of the dates?
Riley Nicholson: Yeah. So join us for the Cabrillo Festival, July 27th through August 9th in the Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium. And we have a special preview including a String Quartet Number Four performed by Friction Quartet, June 20th at Bargetto Winery.
Vivian Fung: Yeah, and my premiere, the premiere of my piece, will be opening night, which is July 31st.
Velvet Einstein: Okay. Great. Well, Vivian and Riley thank you so much for, for joining us today. And, Vivian, I think we’ll go out with another one of your pieces?
Vivian Fung: Yeah. It’s called Parade, which was performed at the Cabrillo Festival in 2024. And this is thelast part of it.
Velvet Einstein: Okay. Yeah, since I faded out the other one, I’ll fade this one in.
Vivian Fung: Okay. All right.
Velvet Einstein: Here we go.
musical excerpt
Velvet Einstein: Music of Vivian Fung. The ending of a piece entitled A Parade. And again, she will have a premiere at the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music coming up at the end of July. So head on down to Santa Cruz for that. And many thanks to Vivian and Riley for coming in to talk about that.
