Listening Parties 2025/26

CAP UCLA is proud to host the latest in The Industry’s continuing series of Listening Parties, events that blend live and recorded music with conversations among composers, artists, scholars , and audiences as they come together to survey and reimagine the landscape of contemporary music and art by listening to — and discussing — both live performances and recordings. 

As a prelude for Jlin’s evening concert at The Nimoy Theater, the artist joins The Industry’s Artistic & Executive Director Tim Griffin as audiences listen to and talk about her inspirations from Igor Stravinsky to Luther Vandross and beyond — helping map the post-genre terrain navigated by so many artists today.

Past and future participants in The Industry’s Listening Party series include artists and instrumentalists such as Moor Mother and SUMAC, Cedric Berry, Sharon Chohi Kim, Veronika Krausas, Christopher Cerrone, and others as part of this informal approach to the organization’s mission of championing opera in the expanded field.

On Sunday, October 5th at Monk Space, members of our Company — fearless and virtuosic performers known for superhuman feats in the service of bold and experimental opera — join for an evening featuring their past work in Industry productions and current projects.

The artists will speak with The Industry’s Tim Griffin on their various inspirations and thoughts on the future of opera as an artform.

We hope you will join us for what promises to be a powerfully evocative evening.

On Wednesday, September 10th at Monk Space, our LAB 2026 Artists – Guillermo E. Brown, Carmina Escobar, and Matana Roberts – join for an evening featuring their past work across multiple artistic disciplines and their plans for presenting new, in-progress works in February 2026.

The artists will speak with The Industry’s Tim Griffin on their various inspirations and thoughts on the future of opera as an artform.

We hope you will join us for what promises to be a powerfully evocative evening.

On Wednesday, May 28th at Monk Space, Black futurist artist and musician Moor Mother (Camae Ayewa) joins for an evening, consisting of two public seatings, featuring work from  The Film, her new album in collaboration with post-metal supergroup, SUMAC, selections of which are newly scored as drones for string quartet in a live performance here.

Also presenting recorded portions of The Film, Moor Mother will speak with The Industry’s Tim Griffin on her inspirations from Nigerian theatre where, as she says, the “opera is in the community”—with a special focus on the music of Black composer Edmond Dédé, including his “Morgiane, ou Le Sultan d’Ispahan,” 1887. The evening concludes with a performance with Aaron Turner from SUMAC.

Much acclaimed since her emergence roughly a decade ago, Moor Mother regularly moves across genres from jazz and spoken word to artful noise, with her 2017 debut, Irreversible Entanglements, called “one of the best jazz albums of the 2010s” by Stereogum. She is currently assistant professor at USC’s Thornton School of Music.