Eclectic jazz musicians come together to honor John Coltrane: jazz innovator, spiritual icon of the Black Arts Movement and patron saint of the avant-garde. Regina Carter-Garnett. Frank Lacy. One extraordinary night of jazz. Meditations/Infinity comes to UCLA’s historic Schoenberg Hall. Featuring Camille Thurman-Greene Quartet String Quintet (Juliette Jones) Frank Lacy Quintet   Featuring: Frank Lacy, trombone, trumpet, French horn; Salim Washington, flute, tenor sax, oboe; Johnathan Blake, drums; Yayoi Ikawa, piano with special guests: Hitomi Oba, tenor saxophone; Jacques Lesure, guitar; Steve Loza, trumpet; Cheryl Keyes, flute; Regina Carter, violin   Theodore A. Harris, Coltrane’s Thunderclap, 1998, paper collage. 11X17in   ABOUT THE ART WORK Theodore A. Harris, Coltrane’s Thunderclap. 1998, paper collage, 11×17 in. Theodore A. Harris (1966-) is a Philadelphia-based visual artist and poet. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and is in private and public collections such as Libraries and Museum University of Delaware, Fort Garland Museum and Cultural Center, University of New Mexico Art Museum, Saint Louis University Museum of Art, La Salle University Art Museum, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, McGill University Visual Arts Collection, Center for Africana Studies; University of Pennsylvania, Kislak Center Rare Books and Manuscript Library; University of Pennsylvania, and the Petrucci Family Foundation Collection of African American Art, and the Winston and Carolyn Lowe Collection. Harris is the co-founder of the Anti-Graffiti Network/Philadelphia Mural Arts Program. Harris has also co-authored and authored books including Our Flesh of Flames (2019), Malcolm X as Ideology (2008) with Amiri Baraka, TRIPTYCH with Amiri Baraka and Jack Hirschman (2011), i ran from it and was still in it with Fred Moten (2007), and Thesentür: Conscientious Objector to Formalism (2017). He is the Founding Artistic Director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Black Aesthetics. LEARN MORE: THEODORE A. HARRIS – Home

Join us for the first of six workshops as part of the Modal Interchange: Conversations on 21st-Century Performance Practices series with Vicki Ray, a Los Angeles based composer and pianist, who will join Wendy Richman in a conversation about concert programming and commissioning new works. Concert Curation IS Composition! Every musician presenting a concert is: a composer! In this talk I’ll explore different ways to think about concert programming and how the works you program constitute a meta-composition. Using musical examples I’ll explore the way connections between worlds – musical and otherwise – can create fresh, interesting juxtapositions that challenge (and hopefully delight!) the performer as well as the listener. Folded into this approach is the opportunity to commission new works that can tie previously unrelated pieces together and expand the repertoire of our instrument. Bio Described as “phenomenal and fearless” Vicki Ray is a pianist, improviser and composer. She has commissioned and premiered countless new works by today’s leading composers. Ray is a founding member of Piano Spheres and was, for many years, the head of keyboard studies at the California Institute of the Arts where she was named the first recipient of the Hal Blaine Chair in Musical Performance. She has appeared on numerous international festivals and was a regular member of the faculty at the Bang On a Can Summer Festival at MASS MoCA. Ray has been featured on the Los Angeles Philharmonic Green Umbrella Series as soloist and collaborative artist. Her widely varied performing and recording career covers the gamut of new and old music: from Boulez to Reich, Wadada Leo Smith to Beethoven. Notable recordings include the first Canadian disc of Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire with the Blue Rider Ensemble, the premiere recordings of Steve Reich’s You Are (Variations) and the Daniel Variations with the Los Angeles Master Chorale and the first recording of John Cage’s Europeras 3 and 4. Her recording of Cage’s The Ten Thousand Things on Microfest Records received 2013 Grammy nomination. Vicki can also be seen playing the chromelodeon in the Los Angeles based PARTCH ensemble. Vicki Ray is a Steinway artist. More about Modal Interchange: Conversations on 21st-Century Performance Practices The personality of Los Angeles’s new music scene mirrors its city’s culture and geography as a whole: equal parts diversity and decentralization, in a battle for recognition and relevance that crisscrosses 650 freeway miles. The Modal Interchange series casts a wide net around LA’s new music community, hosting a diverse group of individuals who might not otherwise share the same artistic and academic spaces, in a series of lecture-workshops geared to an audience of performers. Modal Interchange is a series of six workshops through 2026-27. Each workshop focuses on an element of 21st-century performing, programming, and music-making in the world of contemporary music, with special focus on the topics’ relevance in greater LA: histories of experimental music and the avant-garde, commissioning new works, concert programming, listening as an audience member, listening as a performer, score-reading and part-marking, learning and practicing contemporary works, improvisation practices, and arts activism. This series is conceived and hosted by violist Wendy Richman and produced in partnership with the UCLA Center for Musical Humanities. Dr. Richman is Lecturer in Performance Studies, Director of uclaFLUX, and a founding member of the International Contemporary Ensemble. For the full schedule, please visit our website:

Join the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music as we welcome pianist Elizabeth Schumann for the Fall installment of our 2026/27 David L. Abell Piano Master Series, a concert series which features renowned artists visiting UCLA to perform and work with our piano students.   About Elizabeth Schumann: Dr. Elizabeth Schumann is a concert pianist, educator, and interdisciplinary artist whose work spans leading concert halls, public art initiatives, and research at the intersection of the arts, technology, and human performance. Described by The Washington Post as “deft, relentless, and devastatingly good—the sort of performance you experience not so much with your ears as your solar plexus,” she approaches the concert stage as a place where artistry and inquiry meet, offering audiences experiences that link music with the broader human story. ​ As a recitalist, chamber musician, and concerto soloist, she has performed at the Kennedy Center, Vienna’s Bösendorfer Saal, Weill at Carnegie Hall, Montreal’s Place des Arts, San Francisco’s Davies Symphony Hall, Los Angeles’ Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Musical Instruments Museum in Phoenix, Ravinia’s Rising Stars Series, Australia’s Huntington Festival, the Cannes Film Festival, and the Gilmore International Keyboard Festival. Her performances have been featured on NPR’s Performance Today, PBS, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, and Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Honors include the Gilmore Young Artist Award, first prizes at the Bösendorfer and Pacific International Piano Competitions, and awards at the Cleveland, Hilton Head, Montreal, and World International Piano Competitions. ​ Her portfolio extends beyond traditional concert work to collaborative projects that place music in fresh contexts. She has developed touring productions that integrate performance with narrative and visual design, large-scale public installations that transform city spaces into concert venues, and educational programs for children and underserved communities that pair music with literature and live storytelling. These include Piano Carnival, which grew from a 15-city tour into a book, CD, and interactive applications reaching more than 20,000 students and teachers; Son et Lumière, premiered at Boston’s Illuminus Festival and later commissioned for the Pike & Rose Audio Visual Arts Festival, attracting audiences of over 8,000; and Pianimal, a concert and video series presented across the United States and distributed to children’s hospitals through partnerships with leading arts organizations. Across these projects, her aim is to allow audiences to meet music on their own terms and to experience its power without barriers of price or pretense. Her work has also reached international audiences through U.S. Embassy cultural diplomacy programs, building connections and mutual understanding through performance. ​ Carrying on the pedagogical tradition of her teacher, Sergei Babayan, Dr. Schumann has taught at Winter and Summer Performing Arts at The Juilliard School, Itzhak Perlman’s Perlman Music Program, the Crowden Chamber Music Workshop, and the Vancouver Piano Sessions. She is the Billie Bennett Director of Keyboard Studies and Assistant Professor of Music at Stanford University, where she combines conservatory-level training with insights from neuroscience, psychology, and biomechanics to help pianists achieve expressive freedom while minimizing injury risk. At Stanford, her research examines how physiology, pedagogy, and instrument design shape performance, with applications that extend beyond the arts to fields such as medicine, rehabilitation, and human performance science. ​ Through collaborations that unite artists, scientists, and community leaders, Dr. Schumann expands how people encounter and engage with music. Her work demonstrates how these connections can open new possibilities, deepen understanding, and inspire contributions that reach beyond the concert hall.