DateBook

Format guide

Free Classical Concerts in NorCal

Browse 6 upcoming free classical concerts in Northern California, with date, venue, neighborhood, format, and ticket labels.

Classical DateBook

Free Classical Concerts in NorCal

Find classical concerts with clear free-admission signals in the event feed in Northern California, with upcoming dates, venues, neighborhoods, event details, and ticket signals.

Image: Wikimedia Commons: SFSymphony Hall

16 artists • 4 formats • 43 venues • 4 neighborhoods

(Free Concerts) Filtered Results: 6Clear format filter

Date: Mon, Oct 5, 4:30 PM PDT

Free
Venue: Braun Music Center, Room 103 • Neighborhood: San Francisco Bay Area • • Details

Title: Right vs. Rights: How AI Challenges Copyright and IP in Music Abstract: While the developments in AI and popular music continue to grow in use exponentially, the regulations on the application of these technologies commercially and otherwise are lagging in the U.S. Copyright office. As I will demonstrate in this talk, this lack of regulation is largely a result of historical determination of music as property in relation to tangible or “literate” forms of representation versus how music actually functions through sound and other “intangible” forms of performance. I will consider how this historical determinacy has both racialized and capitalistic dimensions that inform the lack of urgency around regulating AI in the U.S. Matthew D. Morrison , Ph.D., a native of Charlotte, North Carolina, is an Associate Professor in the Department of African and African American Studies in the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University. He is a musicologist and violinist whose research focuses on the relationship between music, identity, performance, as well as property and politics in and beyond American popular culture, with a particular focus on the analysis of race. He is the author of Blacksound: Making Race and Popular Music in the United States (UC Press, 2024), which has been recognized through accolades such as the Woody Guthrie Book Award from the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, The Irving Lowens Book Award from the Society of American Music, an honorable mention from the Royal Music Association’s Cambridge University Book Prize, and named a “Best Music Book of 2024) by Rolling Stone Magazine. His current research explores the ethics of AI and Intellectual Property in music. Admission Information Free Admission

Date: Wed, Oct 7, 12:30 PM PDT

Free
Venue: Campbell Recital Hall • Neighborhood: San Francisco Bay Area • • Details

Join us for our Noon Concert Series , where student musicians from a variety of instrumental and vocal studios take the stage. Each performance offers a vibrant showcase of emerging talent, celebrating music in a relaxed midday setting. Admission Information Free admission Parking permits are required for weekday campus parking. We recommend downloading the ParkMobile app before arriving.

Date: Fri, Oct 9, 7:30 PM PDT

Free
Venue: CCRMA Stage at The Knoll • Neighborhood: San Francisco Bay Area • • Details

Low Frequency Trio premieres works for bass clarinet, double bass, and piano by Stanford Graduate Composers. Formed in 2016, Low Frequency Trio is one of the few ensembles in the world that plays music that was exclusively composed for them. Comprised of Antonio Rosales (bass clarinet), Juan José García (double bass), and José Luis Hurtado (piano), Low Frequency Trio has performed and held residencies at the Centro Mexicano para la Música y las Artes Sonoras, Centro de las Artes of San Luis Potosí, Conservatorio de las Rosas in Morelia, Festival Ecos y Sonidos, Festival Internacional Cervantino, the Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo MUAC UNAM, and the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico, the University of Texas UTRGV, the University of New Mexico, Harvard University, Boston University, and the NY Americas Society in the U.S., as well as the Universidad Nacional de Quilmes and the Conservatorio Manuel de Falla in Argentina. Admission Information Free admission.

Date: Wed, Oct 21, 12:30 PM PDT

Free
Venue: Campbell Recital Hall • Neighborhood: San Francisco Bay Area • • Details

Join us for our Noon Concert Series , where student musicians from a variety of instrumental and vocal studios take the stage. Each performance offers a vibrant showcase of emerging talent, celebrating music in a relaxed midday setting. Admission Information Free admission Parking permits are required for weekday campus parking. We recommend downloading the ParkMobile app before arriving.

Date: Mon, Oct 26, 4:30 PM PDT

Venue: Braun Music Center, Room 103 • Neighborhood: San Francisco Bay Area • • Details

Title: A Theory of Operatic Scene Type Abstract: Scholars of opera since Salome - a placeholder for the historical moment at which one could no longer count on functional harmony, straightforward narrative, or tonally-defined forms at the opera - need ways to talk about opera that are not confined to the silos of composer, subgenre, and style, nor reduced to mere reportage. Inspired by Saariaho's L'amour de loin , I recognized that c ertain scenes have recurred over the centuries, presumably because they make for good theater and offer tantalizing opportunities for musical and poetic expression as well as virtuosic display: love duets, diegetic songs, rage arias. Each of these narrative nodes has accrued features pertaining to music, vocalism, poetry, character, performance practice, and/or staging, that, in the aggregate, constitute a scene type. And, most importantly, each scene type remains recognizable as such regardless of musical style . In other words, the scene type is akin to operatic DNA. This talk sketches out my theory and demonstrates its application in excerpts drawn from a wide range of repertoire. Joy H. Calico is Professor of Musicology and Chair of the Department of Musicology at UCLA. Her scholarship focuses on interdisciplinary Cold War cultural politics, opera since 1900, and Arnold Schoenberg. Her current projects include a theory of twentieth- and twenty-first-century opera according to scene type built on Kaija Saariaho’s L’amour de loin (under contract with University of California Press), and a study of the Arnold Schoenberg Gesamtausgabe as cultural diplomacy and intimate history in the Cold War. Her most recent publication is a coedited volume entitled Childhood and the Operatic Imaginary since 1900 published by Oxford in June 2026. She and Daniel Chua launched the California Studies in Global Musicology (CSGM) book series in 2024. She is also a member of the international working team of the Black Opera Research Network, and hosted the international symposium Opera | Black | Queer at UCLA earlier this month. Admission Information Free Admission

Date: Wed, Oct 28, 12:30 PM PDT

Free
Venue: Campbell Recital Hall • Neighborhood: San Francisco Bay Area • • Details

Join us for our Noon Concert Series , where student musicians from a variety of instrumental and vocal studios take the stage. Each performance offers a vibrant showcase of emerging talent, celebrating music in a relaxed midday setting. Admission Information Free admission Parking permits are required for weekday campus parking. We recommend downloading the ParkMobile app before arriving.

Showing 6 of 6 shows