CALARTS

Monday night at the Japan-America Theater, and the latest running of the CalArts
Contemporary Music Festival came to a festive close, with the rattle and roar
of Balinese percussion blasting its way through the sounds of Western-style
woodwinds and brass. If not much else in the four-day round of concerts and
discussions added up to the sheer dazzle of this last work, “Crossovers” by
the Balinese composer I Nyoman Wenten, the least that can be said of this
extended, challenging weekend was this: even its failures were
interesting.
The paired concepts of interaction and cross-culturation, stated at the outset
of the festival last Friday, remained apparent to the end. Sunday’s concert, in
the Modular Theater on the CalArts campus, was a case in point.
It began with a joyous romp by jazz guru Charlie Haden and his Liberation Music
Orchestra, abetted in some works by Paul Vorwerk’s CalArts Chorus. Big, loud,
wonderfully extroverted but beautifully in control, the 22-piece ensemble
worked mostly around a kind of primeval jazz; spirituals and African chants
figured prominently in the texture, yet the pieces played were also
“classical” in the sense of large-scale, intricate structuring. One regret:
the music’s complexity demanded Haden’s services as a conductor, but allowed no
time for his marvelous bass-playing.
Sunday’s concert ended with more transculturation, music from the CalArts
gamelan under its regular leader K. R. T. Wasitodiningrat, with traditional
dances performed as dancing behind a shadow screen. Part of the ongoing charm
at CalArts has always been the spectacle of its obviously Californiate students
imbued with the techniques and the rhythms of the Indonesian gamelan; even a
deaf person could have picked up on the transcultural process as it worked at
this concert.
The aim at Monday’s concert, with Vorwerk leading the New CalArts 20th Century
Players, seemed to be a sort of sweep through a variety of progressive musical
ideas, demonstrating the interaction process in the relation of player to
computer (as in Jean-Claude Risset’s “Duet for One Pianist) as well as the
interaction of cultures in the Wenten piece.
Along the way there was one low bow toward one of progressive music’s
archetypes, in Karlheinz Stockhausen’s “Refrain” (terribly dated after a mere
30-year existence), another bow toward the instrumental experimenters (Robert
Dick’s “Eyewitness” for flute quartet) and some attractive atmosphere-
depiction (Libby Larsen’s “Black Roller”). There was also James Newton’s
“The Suffering Servant,” a setting of lines from Isaiah for singer and
ensemble.
Nothing much got proved. Bryan Pezzone’s yeoman service in the dreary Risset
work, clattering away at one piano while also activating another by computer
controi, seemed like a lot of fuss over something just as easily accomplished
with one of those “Music Minus One” records. Newton’s piece, with all the
good will in the world, still sounded like what it was, a timid effort by one
of our superb jazz musicians to hide his best talent behind bland declamation
and equally insipid instrumental support.
In the long run, the triumph of the festival was of the usual kind. A lot of
new music got heard over a brief and busy time, played with the high competence
that CalArts drills into all its young performers. Success and failure were
mingled in the classic proportion, and that’s par for the course.