ABOUT JACARANDA
Mailing Address:
1424 4th St. #238
Santa Monica, CA 90401
Phone: (213) 483-0216
Email: patrick.jacarandamusic@gmail.com
Venue Address:
(unless otherwise noted)
First Presbyterian/Santa Monica
1220 2nd Street
Santa Monica, CA 90401
Jacaranda Music produces classical music adventures designed to awaken curiosity, passion, and discovery with a spirit of inclusion. By engaging a wide range of audiences, this curated concert series based in Santa Monica since 2003, is dedicated to advancing the impact of soloists and ensembles with live music, recordings, music videos, and education.
Immediately hailed by LA Weekly as “the right music in the right place at the right time,” they named Jacaranda Best Contemporary Classical Series In 2016: “Wonderfully un-stodgy curation by founders Patrick Scott and Mark Alan Hilt and performances by acclaimed and expert musicians make for ear-cleansing dives into bracingly new music composed by living composers, as well as unplayed-to-death music of the past century.”
The series is devoted to stimulating listeners with ingenious musical experiences. Alex Ross’s blog The Rest Is Noise wrote “season after season the twentieth century comes to life in Jacaranda’s programs.” Jacaranda also champions music written since 2000, as well as neglected earlier music with strong potential interest for today’s listeners. The “powerful” U.S. premiere of a co-commission with Britain’s Aldeburgh Festival, led by composer Peter Eötvös, was also cited by the LA Times for its “national significance.” These concerts are dedicated to advancing the repertoire of soloists and diverse ensembles through live music, recordings, and education.
Jacaranda recently launched METRO (Music Education Through Resource Opportunities) to network and mobilize university music students from CalArts, Chapman University, CSUN, UCLA, and USC through recorded music services, Facebook, and live concerts. Maintaining high performance standards in acoustically effective locations throughout Greater Los Angeles, this innovative concert series is committed to increasing understanding of classical music using unexpected strategies – and by telling the stories of its makers with passion. “A sell-out throng of glitter, beauty and brains in all sorts and varieties responded warmly to the totally decadent music menu…full of energy and themes of unimaginable beauty…” said the Huffington Post.
Board of Directors
Frank Gruber, Chair
Scott Dunn, Vice Chair
Susan Bienkowski, Treasurer and Secretary
Peter Grueneisen
Dwayne Johnson-Cochran
Alyssa Park
Whitney Sander
Ex Officio
Mark Alan Hilt, Music Director
Patrick Scott, Artistic & Executive Director
Thomas Aujero Small, Advisory Council Chair
Advisory Council
Thomas Aujero Small, Chair
Sasha Anawalt
Steven D. Lavine
Deborah Borda
Daniel Meyerowitz
Gloria Cheng
Movses Pogossian
Gail Eichenthal
Arthur Rieman
Grant Gershon
Peter Sellars
Joseph Horowitz
Chad Smith
William Kraft
Sheila Tepper
Veronika Krausas
Catherine Uniack
David Lang
Bill Viola & Kira Perov
Morten Lauridsen
Michael Webb
Patrick Scott, Artistic & Executive Director, is one of the most original thinkers about classical music today. After two decades helming the critically-acclaimed concert series Jacaranda Music in Santa Monica, CA, he directs Jacaranda Media, centered on Jacaranda Live Recordings, a physical and digital recording label that also produces special classical music and technology events. Writing uncommonly detailed program notes from a broad inter-disciplinary perspective, Scott embodies what musical curation is all about—yet he has achieved that distinction with no formal music education.
Born in Manitoba, Canada, and naturalized as a US citizen in 2015, Scott’s American schooling in the visual arts, dance, and stage design led to a 15-year career on the West Coast as a designer and craftsman for film, television, stage, opera, ballet, and video. At age 16 he was the youngest member of the Gustav Mahler Society, an Eagle Scout decorated for high-endurance hikes, and a ballet dancer appearing with George Zorich, star of the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo. At University of California Irvine, he was awarded the Chancellor’s Award and President’s Fellowship for painting. His teachers were among the “who’s who” of California artists – Robert Irwin, Vija Celmins, Kenneth Price, Tony Delap, and Ed Moses. After a summer scholarship at the American School of Dance, he performed in UCI’s lavish oratorio/ballet Catulli Carmina by Carl Orff. He attended master classes with Merce Cunningham and John Cage, as well as graduate seminars in art history with Barbara Rose and acoustics at UCLA. Scott designed the set, costumes and lighting for UCI’s first Master’s thesis in directing and was the first student to design for UCI’s Claire Trevor Theatre—then the Village Theater’s inaugural production of Camino Real guest-directed by Tennessee Williams specialist Herbert Machiz. The U.S. premiere of Vesalii Icones, a dance drama by Sir Peter Maxwell Davies for Monday Evening Concerts at LA County Museum of Art, was his first professional achievement merging concept with design. As Patrick Marca Registrada, Scott’s Hollywood off-screen credits include Lipstick (starring Anne Bancroft); Roger Corman’s Battle Beyond the Stars and Planet of Horror; and Ralph Bakshi’s animated Lord of the Rings. At NBC his work appeared in The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, The Bob Hope Show, and the soap opera Days of Our Lives; as well as in two major motion pictures: The Bodyguard and Cable Guy. Stage work included A Man for All Seasons (starring Charleton Heston) at Ahmanson Theater, and The Tempest (starring Sir Anthony Hopkins) at Mark Taper Forum, as well as Saint Joan for Seattle Repertory Theater featuring Roberta Maxwell, John DeLancie, and Jean Smart. Opera included Samson et Dalila (starring Shirley Verrett and Placido Domingo) for PBS Great Performances live from the San Francico’s War Memorial Opera House. He danced in two episodes of Shelley Duvall’s Faerie Tale Theatre on Showtime. Costume design for dance included Bella Lewitzky Dance Company, five seasons of Eyes Wide Open Dance Theater, Jazz Tap Ensemble, Los Angeles Chamber Ballet, and commissioned designs for Santa Barbara Ballet and Pacific Northwest Ballet. In addition to co-conceiving and designing Cinderella at Midnight, the final Cockette’s midnight show in San Francisco’s Palace Theater, he designed star wardrobe and made a cameo appearance in the film Garage Sale (starring Goldie Glitters). The film screened as part of Los Angeles 1955-85, a notorious 2006 exhibition in Paris’ Centre Pompidou. Scott designed wardrobe for two 1984 Olympic Video Art commissions and appeared sleeping in Bill Viola’s video installation The Sleepers (1992). His pioneering music videos are held in the Getty Center’s legendary archive from the Long Beach Museum of Art.
Scott’s non-profit leadership included producing innovative interdisciplinary cultural collaborations and two extensive anthologies geared to high school teachers and their students for Los Angeles Educational Partnership. For the 50th anniversary of Kristallnacht, he co-produced a live broadcast on KUSC of Angeles Quartet with pianist Gloria Cheng and baritone Hector Gonzales in music by Korngold and Schoenberg. Scott produced the West Coast debut of duo-pianists Double Edge. As Executive Director of Film Independent (then Independent Feature Project West) he helped expand the Spirit Awards to become what it is today and lobby into existence the congressionally authorized Independent Television Service (ITVS) on PBS. He directed a ground-breaking education program for Peter Sellars’ LA Festival and chaired the Motion Picture Centennial Committee under the auspices of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. As co-chair of the National Alliance of Media Arts Centers, and President of the National Alliance for Freedom of Expression, he facilitated suing the National Endowment for the Arts on behalf of four censored artists, achieving victory at Royball Ninth Circuit Court, only to be defeated on appeal by the U.S. Supreme Court. He wrote the official Quaker history of Pasadena’s Pacific Oaks College & Children’s school and secured a major grant from Keck Foundation for the institution. As chief development officer of LA’s BEST after school enrichment program in the Mayor’s Office, City of Los Angeles, he helped raise over $16 million and secured funds from the Broad Foundation to initiate art, music and dance residencies in over 194 public elementary schools throughout Los Angeles County. For the Colburn School, he curated Found Horizon: Stravinsky in LA’s Progressive Music Scene 1949-66, a Pacific Standard Time event sponsored by the Getty Center. Scott established artistic partnerships with Jacaranda and LA Phil including “Left Coast West Coast”, “Americans in Americas,” “Focus on Eötvös”, and “Minimalist Jukebox”. The LA Opera’s “Ring Festival LA” partnership was followed by “Britten 100.” Scott can be seen acting as one of Christopher Plummer’s close circle of friends in the Oscar-winning film Beginners directed by Mike Mills. Scott’s “Cage 100” festival gave the world premiere of John Cage’s The Ten Thousand Things, landing it on LA Times “International Best” list. Cage was also celebrated with a 24-hour performance of Eric Satie’s complete Vexations that employed 36 pianists. Garnering considerable press, the semi-staged world premiere of the opera Arkhipov by Peter Knell, directed by Elkhanah Pulitzer, was timed to coincide with the 60th anniversary of the 1962 “Cuban Missile Crisis”. For its final season, Jacaranda offered “Planet Schoenberg” celebrating the 150th birthday of the great composer. His youngest son, Larry Schoenberg recently singled out Jacaranda for having done more to serve his father’s legacy than any other organization.
Scott produced the West Coast premiere of David Lang’s Pulitzer-prize winning the little match girl passion with an incandescent quartet of singing percussionists led by tenor Grant Gershon. “The audience sat transfixed,” wrote Mark Swed of the LA Times, “the performance was a stunner.” A friendship with Lang led to Jacaranda’s LA premiere of the composer’s darker for 12 solo strings (“absorbing…gleamingly energized” – LA Times) and sleepers prayer, a co-commission with the LA Phil for its inaugural new music marathon Noon to Midnight. BBC Music Magazine recognized Scott’s curatorial vision with their editors’ choice of Jacaranda among the 20 best live concerts in North America. His “OM Century”, a 2-year celebration of the Olivier Messiaen centenary, garnered international attention for its daring scope. Of the celebration’s grand finale concert Alan Rich, dean of American critics, wrote “I cannot remember a better-imagined, better played program supercharged with the pleasure of discovery…improbable but tangible deliciousness…”
Mark Alan Hilt, Music Director and Conductor, has elevated Jacaranda to prominence by conducting a wide-range of ensemble works, concerti, cantatas, masses, chamber symphonies, and music with large forces – including the 2009 U.S. premiere of Messiaen’s Song of the Deported (1945), performed by orchestra and chorus of more than 180. Commissioned by Radio France for the liberation of the concentration camps, the work was subsequently lost until 1992. Hilt served as music director of Benjamin Britten’s chamber opera Curlew River, with support from the Britten Foundation, receiving only its second local performance since 1968. “A rare communal spirit was achieved,” wrote the LA Times, “a moving important occasion.”
Hilt led the U.S. premiere of Terry Riley’s forgotten Olsen III with more than 75 student and adult musicians. In 2010, he assembled a 40-minute suite of all five “Knee Plays” from the opera Einstein on the Beach by Philip Glass, working from the manuscript. His choral conducting has included works by Britten, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Thomas Adès, and Schubert. His instrumental conducting included Gerald Barry’s Bob, Toro Takemitsu’s Rain Spell, Steve Reich’s Eight Lines, Chinary Ung’s Aura, Mozart’s Serenade No. 10 Gran Partita, and – at Walt Disney Concert Hall – Schnee (the 2006 version) by Hans Abrahamsen in October 2016.
In 2015 he made a performance edition of Alfred Schnittke’s Septet, originally premiered at the 1982 Memorial for Leonid Brezhnev in Moscow. Concertos included Lou Harrison’s Suite for Violin and Strings, Arvo Pärt’s Tabula Rasa, Mozart’s Concerto for Flute and Harp, Britten’s Young Apollo, Paul Hindemith’s Kammermusic, and Messiaen’s La Ville d’en Haut, an LA premiere with pianist Gloria Cheng. Hilt conducted music for vocal and/or chorus with chamber orchestra including songs by Charles Ives, Samuel Barber’s Knoxville Summer of 1915, Stravinsky’s Mass, Franz Liszt’s Via Crucis, Takemitsu’s Signals from Heaven, Mozart’s Exultate Jubilate, Britten’s Rejoice in the Lamb, Alberto Ginastera’s Cantata para America Magica (with Lucy Shelton), Morton Feldman’s Rothko Chapel, and Eric Zeisl’s Hebrew Requiem. About a rare performance of Schubert’s Song of the Spirits Over the Waters, LA Opus wrote, “Hilt and his committed voices and strings gave it there all in a riveting performance…one that explored every tortured byway to its final relieving cadence.”
Symphonically, Hilt has conducted Carlos Chavez’s Sinfonia India, Franz Schreker’s Chamber Symphony, Adagio from the Tenth Symphony by Mahler arranged for the Kremerata Baltica, and “Demeurer dans l’Amour,” the string orchestra movement from Messiaen’s last major work Eclairs sur l'Au De-la..., another LA premiere. Additionally, he conducted the ballet suite Estancia by Ginastera, and Charles Ives’ Unanswered Question. Of particular note were his stunning performances at Barnum Hall of Et Expecto Resurrectionem Mortuorum for winds and percussion by Messiaen, and, at First Presbyterian Church of Santa Monica, performances of Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony, and Requiem für Eine Polka by Henryk Górecki.
Since 2008, Hilt has been director of the Harvard-Westlake Upper School orchestra program comprised of a symphony orchestra, string ensemble, percussion group, and chamber music. To raise the capacity of the orchestra, he commissioned new works by David Lefkowitz, Joan Huang, Gernot Wolfgang, and Adrienne Albert. Hilt is music director and organist of the First Presbyterian Church. His tenure began with directing a Bach 2000 mini-festival. Bach, Messiaen, Cage, Sofia Gubaidulina, Pärt, and Philip Glass are prominent in his mostly 20th century organ repertoire. Beginning as a self-taught teenager in Kansas, with studies at Wichita State and Southern University of Illinois, Hilt gained extensive experience as a keyboardist, choral director, accompanist, vocal coach, and opera conductor.
STATEMENT OF CULTURAL EQUITY & INCLUSION (CEI)
Jacaranda’s founders have valued racial, gender, and LGBTQIA diversity in hiring, programming, and audience development since its first season in 2003. Patrick Scott and Mark Alan Hilt have distinguished careers in education and have strong individual histories taking stands for the primacy of arts, racial equity, freedom of expression, and the necessity of diverse cultural inclusion as a reflection of American society. They strive to sustain a culture of continuous improvement. Their long history of sensitivity to inclusion, and the board’s complete alignment, put Jacaranda at the leading edge of small classical music organizations regarding inclusion and cultural equity.