Voice Student's Band Plays SF's Famed Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival

Voice student Lily Bogas' band Seldon played San Francisco's iconic Hardly Strictly Bluegrass (HSB) festival on Saturday, a free concert that draws, by some estimates, up to 750,000 attendees to Golden Gate Park annually.

Bay Area native Bogas studies with SFCM's Frederica Von Stade Distinguished Professor of Voice, Catherine Cook, and arrived at SFCM in fall 2025, distinguishing herself with roles in Conservatory productions of Alcina, Cendrillon, and Craig Terry's 2025 Beyond the Aria performance.

Lily Bogas (far right) in 'Cendrillon.'

She also comes by her songwriting talents quite naturally. Her parents, Ed Bogas and Desirée Goyette-Bogas, are musicians: Ed took over composing duties for the TV show Peanuts after Vince Guaraldi's death before moving on to score all six seasons of Garfield and Friends (among many other credits); and Desirée—aside from collaborating with Ed on both of those shows—is an accomplished singer and voiceover artist. (Most importantly, however, Desirée is also an SFCM alumna who graduated in 1992 with a degree in Composition.)

But Bogas says her parents "never pushed music on me … It was just this thing, you know, 'Oh, they're songwriting again.' I was always listening to it, but I never had any formal songwriting training." She started writing her own songs on guitar with the surplus of free time she had in 2020 due to the COVID-19 lockdowns, "primarily folk music." (Bogas counts Joni Mitchell among her many influences.)

Craig Terry and Lily Bogas in 2025.

Bogas started singing opera when she was 14 on the advice of her then-voice teacher. But Cook, she says, "is a great teacher because she really welcomes artistic creativity with her students and she never makes me feel held back from taking opportunities like Hardly Strictly." Her Beyond the Aria performance in 2025, Bogas says, "made me feel like I had the space to show a side of myself I can’t always show the operatic world—I sang 'Alfie' by Burt Bacharach—one of my favorite standards." 

"There's something so special about working with a teacher who has the same voice part as you," Bogas adds. "Cathy has a plethora of knowledge and experience in what it really takes to be a 21st-century artist, because she is one. It's incredible to watch her balance her teaching life and her very vibrant performance life with this smile and air of calmness. I walk into her room for my lessons, and I feel like even just being around her makes me a better artist and singer."

Seldon grew from Bogas' lockdown writing into a full band with a horn section that draws from not only her folk-style writing, but jazz, R&B, and soul music. The group's song "Nothing to Say" caught hold in 2024, racking up over 100,000 plays, and their connections in the Bay Area led them to San Francisco's beloved Porchfest—an annual festival that books bands to perform on, yes, porches (and stoops) in the city's Mission District—that booked them at HSB.

Lily Bogas.

"Hardly Strictly," as it's known, was founded by F. Warren Hellman, a financier who became the youngest-ever partner in Lehman Brothers' history. He became an early venture capitalist, investing in what would become Comcast and Apple, though he nurtured a deep and abiding love of bluegrass music. An accomplished banjo player, Hellman once called the festival he founded and endowed a "selfish gift" to its musicians as well as himself, telling Forbes, "How could you have more fun than that? What the hell is money for if it isn’t for something like that?"

In the near future, Bogas has planned a live session with Seldon in SFCM's Studio G, collaborating with students from SFCM's Technology and Applied Composition Department. A little under a month from her HSB debut, she's also taking the stage as part of Music of Remembrance's Journeys performance at Seattle's Benaroya Hall, singing songs from We Go On, Oswego, a song cycle in tribute to the women who escaped Nazi Germany to America's only WWII refugee camp, in Fort Ontario, New York.

"I'm on this journey to an operatic career," Bogas says of her future plans, "but I also want to prioritize a career in making music that I feel connected to, above anything else."

Learn more about studying Voice or Technology and Applied Composition at SFCM.