WOMEN COMPOSERS ARE FEATURED AT NORTHRIDGE

Minorities in the arts, as in nearly everything else, must either grab for the brass ring of equality, providing they have deft fingers, or shrink back from the merry-go-round and settle for their own, segregated and lesser-known, amusement park.

The International Congress on Women in Music, which clearly constitutes a minority, set up such a park last weekend at Cal State Northridge. A four-event festival honoring women composers and involving the university’s students and faculty, it had the earmarks of a ghetto enterprise: a certain provincialism and callow self-consciousness at the public forum.

Yet the atmosphere was free of the hard political edge that characterizes mainstream competition. If the so-called successful women in music can be counted on the fingers of one hand, it stands to reason that the others, perhaps less gifted, might be satisfied with a separate niche at a possibly lower level of achievement. For the most part, Friday’s program bore out that reasoning. Luckily, however, one work stood apart from the rest: Haruna Aoki’s “Joya.” The most ambitious item on the agenda, it boasted scope, structure and a distinctive aura--whereas the others were either ill-focused exercises, rehashings of compositional history or mere bagatelles.

The Tokyo-trained Aoki calls upon every available atmospheric element for her paean to the Buddhist New Year. With Japanese lanterns flanking stage sides and house lights lowered, a tape emits simulated cricket sounds, momentous drones and a random pulse--sweeping all before a benignly indifferent cosmos.

The next section, performed by a brightly lit wind-string-percussion ensemble led by Peter Ioannou, continues these motifs. Finally, Aoki, in traditional dress, does a slow ritual walk onstage for her thin, wailing Sprechgesang , the text of which she unfurls from a scroll.

The small audience erupted in wild applause for this remarkable piece.

But Ida Gotkovsky, who studied with Boulanger and Messiaen, didn’t require quiet for her Symphony for Wind Orchestra, a big, blustery, undifferentiating work that reminisces over Stravinsky’s “Sacre du Printemps” and “Petrushka.” Neither did Jane Frasier’s “Pacific Fantasy,” also for about 50 woodwinds, show much originality.

“Match Point,” a musical joke by Gwyneth Walker, contented itself with bouncing balls, mouth-popping sounds and David Whitwell conducting in tennis togs while brandishing a racket. Donna Phillips’ Three Movements for winds and percussion was not without relative interest, given its sparse materials and adynamic course.