IN 1946, ARTIST EMILE NORMAN RETURNED FROM NEW YORK CITY TO HIS NATIVE CALIFORNIA and settled in Big Sur with his partner, Brooks Clement. That same year, they attended the Carmel Bach Festival – its first edition after a four-year, wartime hiatus, the series having been canceled from 1942 through 1945 – and Norman was immediately, and permanently, hooked. He came every year after that until he died more than 60 years later, not merely to concerts but also to rehearsals, hearing the same compositions performed again and again in search of something new in each iteration.
“Because it’s live music, it’s different every single time,” says Heather Lanier, director of the nonprofit Emile Norman Arts. “For him it was fine-tuning his knowledge and his love of music.”
He became one of the festival’s most recognizable figures: purple beret, purple jacket, purple high-tops, a devoted presence in the audience and backstage alike. Musicians who had never formally met him knew exactly who he was. “He’s known to the musicians and to the staff as Emile Norman,” Lanier says, “but also as the man in the purple hat.”
Before Big Sur, Norman (1918-2009) had attracted attention in New York, where his window displays for department stores earned coverage in Vogue. But those commissions were a minor prelude to the full scope of his talent. His sculptures and mosaic works brought him lasting recognition – most famously, a 40-by-46-foot mosaic window for the Nob Hill Masonic Center in San Francisco – but his greatest creation may be the mountaintop house in Big Sur he built and decorated over nearly 60 years. Every surface reflects his hand: intricate woodwork, stained glass, nature-inspired inlay that took years to complete. “Every inch of it is built and designed by him, with an artist’s eye,” says Nathan Lutz, executive director of the Carmel Bach Festival. “The moment you walk in, you feel this magic.”
At the heart of the house, in a room of its own, stands a 948-pipe Baroque tracker organ from Germany – a birthday gift Norman gave to Clement. He spent a year adorning its exterior cabinet with inlay work, both an artistic act and an act of devotion. Norman loved Bach, who during his own lifetime was celebrated primarily as a virtuoso organist and expert on organ construction. Norman wanted organists to play Bach here. Norman didn’t consider himself a skilled musician – both he and Clement kept pianos, harpsichords and organs throughout the house and played every day, but Norman’s relationship to the instrument was personal rather than performative.
“Emile says of Brooks that Brooks played beautifully,” Lanier recalls. “But of himself, he said: ‘I just played for my own amazement.’ Which I love.”
Lanier traces that love of Bach to Norman’s high school years in Los Angeles in the early 1930s, where he participated in music and theater, and likely deepened through his time in New York, where he absorbed opera and concerts with voracious attention. At one point, Norman and Clement even loaned one of their smaller organs to the festival for a concert – a small gesture that pointed toward a larger generosity. The Carmel Bach Festival is the recipient of a $350,000 donation from the Emile Norman Charitable Trust. He had left instructions for his trustee to reward the festival for “the continuing joy that it brings to our communities.”
Now, as the 2026 festival begins, both nonprofits, Emile Norman Arts and the Carmel Bach Festival, are honoring that vision together with plans for something new already taking shape for the 2027 festival. They are putting together a three-hour-long concert event titled Emile Norman Retreat in Big Sur, with tickets on pre-sale now, at $1,250 each. The concert will take place on July 6 of next year at Norman’s home on Pfeiffer Ridge in Big Sur, giving guests rare access to a place few outsiders have ever seen. In time for this year’s Bach Festival, the foundation is also mounting an exhibition in the foyer of Sunset Center, featuring Norman’s works alongside a slideshow of the house and the life that continues within it.
One of the three pillars of Norman’s trust specified that his home would go on supporting arts nonprofits in the area. “Being reconnected with the Bach Festival was a dream from the beginning,” Lanier says. “Emile was a devoted participant since the time he arrived here. It was such a big part of his life.”
THE THEME OF THIS YEAR’S BACH FESTIVAL, THE NATURE OF THE SOUND, carries a deliberate double meaning. It gestures toward a phenomenological question, an inquiry into the very essence of sound, while also nodding to the spectacular natural world surrounding Carmel. It is a theme that resonates with violinist Edwin Huizinga, a 21-year veteran of the festival who carries his own personal history with Norman.
“I remember seeing and meeting Emile at the concerts,” Huizinga says. “That is a really beautiful memory of mine – just to see him in the audience.”
Through his work with Big Sur Fiddle Camp and the Big Sur Land Trust, Huizinga grew close to the community around Emile Norman Arts and eventually joined its advisory board. In recent years, he has brought festival musicians to perform at the house. “The musicians come from all over the world – many of them live in big cities, in Europe, in New York City,” Huizinga says. “When you bring them to a tiny little house way up on the cliffs of Big Sur, it’s otherworldly, very special and incredibly connected to the Earth.”
Of his two decades with the festival, Huizinga adds, “You kind of become part of the landscape. It’s so important to me. I consider this area one of my homes.”
The 89th Carmel Bach Festival opens Saturday, July 11, with all season passes sold out but individual tickets still available. Now in its third year under Lutz, the festival is bursting at the seams – two weeks of programming packed so tightly that expansion is already under discussion. (Hence the planning already well underway a year ahead of schedule for an event in Norman’s Big Sur home. Earlier this season, free preseason concerts took place in libraries in Monterey, Marina and Salinas.)
Alongside the big concerts, the festival spreads into venues across Carmel, including the longtime anchor of Carmel Mission Basilica. New this season is Studio 105, an intimate space dubbed the Carmel Cabaret located on the first floor of the Sunset Center and suited to small theatrical productions and close-quarters performance. “It has a very different feeling,” Lutz says.
It’s the setting for the program crafted by festival’s 2026 featured composer and curator Angélica Negrón, whose practice makes her a natural embodiment of the festival’s theme. The program she curates at Studio 105 is titled “Field of Sound,” taking place on Thursday, July 23.
Negrón draws from the natural world directly – running sound through plants and vegetables, weaving field recordings into composition, but this is one way she approached music.
Two of Negrón’s works, Lo infinito and Marejada, will be presented, the former as part of the Sunday candlelight series and the latter on Fridays at the Sunset Center. (Read more in a profile of Negrón on p. 24.)
Another recommendation Lutz offers is for Sunday’s main concert at Sunset Center Theater (Sundays, July 12 and 19), Bach & Rebel, curated and directed by the festival’s artistic director, Grete Pederson. The program is striking in its architecture. It opens with a funeral march for Queen Mary, moves through a French ballet by Jean-Féry Rebel, and arrives at the program’s centerpiece, Nuits, adieux, by Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho, who died in 2023. Then it settles into a Purcell hymn arrangement before closing with Bach’s “Cantata 214.”
“We start with death and chaos,” Lutz says, “and then a kind of rebirth, coming back to Bach’s cantata.” It is, he says, characteristically Pederson: “What she does so well is place Bach within the context of the modern world.”
That is what the festival has always insisted on – that Bach is not a historical artifact but a living presence, one that sounds different whether in a concert hall, in a centuries-old mission, on a stage where the audience sits among the players, or perhaps most vividly in a house on a cliff above the Pacific – by a fellow designer, a fellow master of intricate art, even if channeled through a different medium.
THE 89TH CARMEL BACH FESTIVAL runs Saturday, July 11-Sunday, July 26. Various times and venues. Free-$280. (831) 624-1521, bachfestival.org. Tickets for the Emile Norman Retreat in Big Sur on Tuesday, July 6, 2027 are available at tinyurl.com/Bach2027.