Be a part of the New Music Forever Endeavor!

Make the Cabrillo Festival part of your legacy with a Planned Gift.

By including the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music in your estate plans, you will advance the cause of new music and support the work of living composers, and help guarantee a profound heritage of music for generations to come.

Our staff can assist you in exploring options that will further your financial goals while ensuring the Festival’s strength for its next 50 years. Whether or not you’ve created a comprehensive estate plan, you can take action now by simply naming the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music as a beneficiary of an IRA account or Life Insurance policy. If you have questions, please use our contact form and a member of our staff will be happy to review the possibilities with you.

Thank you for your consideration in making the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music part of your legacy plans. We know you have many goals, and we would be honored to be among those that prove important to you.

LEGACY MEMBERS… THEIR STORIES

When NANCY LOSHKAJIAN refers to the Cabrillo Festival as her family, she means it literally. In 2005, she was leaving a Festival meeting and experienced unfamiliar vertigo that turned out to be a stroke. She credits her fellow Festival board members and staff as key in assisting her to a complete recovery. “I was only 51 years old,” she recalls, “but I realized anything can happen to anybody at any time.” It was then that she made a commitment in her will to the Cabrillo Festival. “I can’t leave a gazillion dollars, but I can earmark now the amount which I would love to be able to give and have the satisfaction of knowing that it will go to the Festival in the future. I can be a really big spender without having to spend anything” Loshkajian laughs, “and it feels great.”

For three decades, LESLIE STEWART has been a violinist in the Cabrillo Festival Orchestra. Each summer she travels from Colorado to stay with one of more than 80 community members who host all of the Festival’s musicians and guest artists each season. Leslie has had the same host for the past 15 years! “I think of her as family,” she says. The importance of the Festival in Leslie’s life was affirmed when she and her husband recently wrote their will and included a gift to the Festival in their bequest. Leslie’s passion for Cabrillo recently inspired one of her 18-year-old violin students at Colorado State to travel to Santa Cruz to participate in the Festival’s Student Staff Program. “Great things are happening with this Festival,” Leslie likes to say.

If the Cabrillo Festival has ever had a combined guardian angel, Jewish mother, and fairy godmother, it probably was embodied in the late ELLEN SCHUCK. Ellen is remembered with great fondness and appreciation by the Festival and its Orchestra, in part because of a generous bequest that, in 2005 was one of our first realized planned gifts from a Festival member’s estate. Ellen’s gift effectively doubled the Festival’s Artistic Initiative Reserve Fund, a powerful resource that provides the financial stability needed to advance the cause of new music and the work of living composers. At the time, it was the largest personal gift in the Festival’s history.

Moreover, she was a familiar and consistent presence at Festival events and a joyous, enthusiastic booster of the Festival orchestra. Ellen and her volunteer crew, with the help of some of the best bakeries in Santa Cruz, prepared lavish and loving breakfasts for 70 orchestra musicians at every rehearsal. She cheered the artists on like a parent on the sidelines of a soccer field.

As a refugee from Nazi Germany whose family fled Europe in the ‘30s, Ellen Schuck brought to America a great love of classical music, a passion for artists, and a reverence for the artistic process. Her decades-long career as a clinical therapist and staff supervisor for Family Services was a natural background for Ellen to bring unflagging encouragement and support to Festival activities and assume the role of “orchestra Mom.”

Ellen’s involvement with the Cabrillo Festival might be said to illustrate Shakespeare’s, “The more I give to thee, the more I have.” If the Festival was a source of inspiration and purpose for her year after year, Ellen’s legacy set a standard and an example for other Festival members to bring their support to an entity that enriches their own lives. She exemplifies how ordinary people and their involvement can have a profound effect, both personally and practically, on the Festival and its future. As a donor, host, subscriber, cheerleader, and individual whose life was dedicated to giving to others, she will be long remembered by the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music. The power of Ellen’s gift is evident every year at the Festival, and the posterity of her love and commitment lives on in all we do.