Details
Like the bridges that shape the Bay Area, music connects people, ideas, and perspectives. Hear five works—including two West Coast premieres—that bring together cultures, generations, and artistic traditions, revealing the creative conversations that shape our region’s vibrant musical community.
PROGRAM
SHUYING LI Migration (2021) *
MATTHEW EVAN TAYLOR Pursuit (2016)
INÉS THIEBAUT apeiron (2025) *
MICHAEL GILBERTSON Breath and Shadow (2011)
DARIUS MILHAUD Stanford Serenade (1971), featuring Kyle Bruckmann, oboe
*This piece is a West Coast Premiere.
INSIDE THE MUSIC
Matthew Evan Taylor — Pursuit
An AfroPneumatic composer, multi-instrumentalist, and improviser, Taylor creates music described as “insistent and defiant…envelopingly hypnotic.” Pursuit draws you in with restless rhythms and evolving textures that gather momentum, shift direction, and reach toward what comes next. It’s music that makes the act of searching itself feel exhilarating.
Shuying Li — Migration
Praised for music that is “vivid, dramatic” and “enjoyable,” Li brings bold storytelling and rich color to Migration. Musical ideas travel and transform, drawing on traditions from around the world and revealing how music can connect cultures and experiences.
Inés Thiebaut — apeiron
Inspired by the ancient Greek concept of the boundless, apeiron explores emergence, transformation, and return. Acoustic instruments and live electronics merge and separate, moving from fragile textures to turbulent sound fields before dissolving into silence. Written in the wake of loss, the piece turns these transformations into an intimate meditation on grief, memory, and renewal.
Michael Gilbertson — Breath and Shadow
Described as “elegant” and “delectably subtle,” Gilbertson finds extraordinary expressive power in small musical changes. Delicately layered textures, quiet gestures, and canons that act as musical “shadows” evoke the rhythms of breath, resonance, and silence. Here, the smallest shifts can carry the greatest emotional weight.
Darius Milhaud — Stanford Serenade
A key figure in 20th-century modernism, Milhaud brings a distinctly French voice to Stanford Serenade, where the oboe’s lyrical lines meet his signature polytonal style. Originally written for a star oboe student at Stanford, the work connects generations of musicians, brought to life here by SF Contemporary Players oboist Kyle Bruckmann.
Together, these five works offer a glimpse at the Bay Area’s living creative network, where ideas travel, traditions evolve, and artists influence one another across generations. Bay Bridges offers a chance to hear that community in action.
