San Francisco Contemporary Music Players

The San Francisco Contemporary Music Players is an ensemble of classically trained instrumentalists that commissions, performs, and records innovative new music, including music that integrates electronic and acoustic sounds.

SFCMP was founded to give voice to the burgeoning genre of contemporary chamber music in the Bay Area. Led by Artistic Director Eric Dudley, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players is the longest-standing, continuously performing new music ensemble outside the East Coast. They are solely devoted to contemporary repertoire, particularly the work of living composers.

In 1971, composer Charles Boone began organizing a series of avant-garde music concerts in San Francisco art galleries. He called the series BYOP (Bring Your Own Pillow), because audience members sat on the floor. Three years later, his colleagues, harpist Marcella DeCray and oboist/conductor Jean-Louis LeRoux, reorganized the concert series as a nonprofit corporation and began to recruit musicians to form its core ensemble.

A ten-time winner of the national ASCAP/Chamber Music America Award for Adventurous Programming of Contemporary Music, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players has performed more than 1,100 contemporary works, including many U.S. and world premieres, and has commissioned new pieces from such composers as John Adams, John Cage, Fred Frith, Liza Lim, James Newton, and Julia Wolfe.

Now in their 42nd season, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players give audience members and friends opportunities to discover musical repertoire that is new to them – and to use these experiences as ways to better understand, interact with, and enjoy their lives and our world.

In 1983, Frank Zappa led the ensemble in performing music by Edgard Varèse. The concert, which was emceed by Jefferson Airplane vocalist Grace Slick and held in the San Francisco Opera House, attracted an audience of more than 2,000 people. In 1997, electric guitarist Bill Frisell and drummer Joey Baron appeared as soloists with the ensemble, performing Steven Mackey’s concerto, Deal. Later the same year, vocalist Dawn Upshaw appeared with the ensemble in a performance of George Crumb’s Ancient Voices of Children.

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