“one of the area’s most innovative music showcases”
-KPBS 

“magnificently enlightening”
-Los Angeles Times

Winner 2010 ASCAP/CMA Award for Adventurous Programming

Matt McBane: Founder and Director 
Calder Quartet: Founding Ensemble-in-Residence

The ninth annual Carlsbad Music Festival will be held Friday-Sunday, September 21-23, 2012. The Carlsbad Music Festival is an annual event that features world-class adventurous performers and composers in the charming seaside Village of Carlsbad. The Festival has been praised by local and national media including the Los Angeles Times, which called the Festival “magnificently enlightening.” In 2010, the Festival won the national ASCAP Chamber Music America Award for Adventurous Programming at an award ceremony in New York. This year, the Festival was awarded a prestigious Artworks Grant from the National Endowment of the Arts.

This year’s eclectic and adventurous Festival will feature some of the most interesting musicians working across genres including classical, folk, Jazz, pop and world music All events will take place in the charming Village of Carlsbad, within a short walking distance of the train, beach, hotels, and restaurants. This year's Festival features everything from the Calder Quartet's thoroughly contemporary take on the string quartet to Sara Watkins' personal mix of bluegrass, singer-songwriter and pop; from Wu Man's international take on the traditional Chinese pipa to composer Michael Gordon epic and brilliant composition for 6 percussionists playing amplified and tuned 2x4s (yes, from the hardware store), Timber. In short, “adventurous music by the beach.”

The Festival was founded in 2003 by composer Matt McBane for its first festival in the spring of 2004. It has since received critical acclaim and drawn enthusiastic audiences to its concerts in the coastal California city of Carlsbad.

What people are saying about the Festival:

“It may be too soon and too hyperbolic to declare Carlsbad as a new hotbed of contemporary classical music action. But as the sixth annual Carlsbad Music Festival unfolds this weekend featuring new music notables the Calder String Quartet, the California E.A.R. Unit and guitarist-composer-conceptualist Fred Frith, clearly something is abuzz in the seaside town, at least for one weekend each year...

Founded and nimbly run by young composer-violinist Matt McBane, the festival provides a fresh West Coast forum for new music, commissioned, performed and served up with seriousness as well as audience accessibility.”
–LA Times

Founding Ensemble-in-Residence, the Calder Quartet: 

 "I've written before that every time I hear the Calder, the ensemble seems to have reached a new level. That remains true, and now only the stars are the limit, as the Calder takes its place as one of America's most satisfying -- and most enterprising -- quartets."
–Mark Swed, LA Times