MULTICULTURAL MUSICAL MELANGE : PACIFIC RING FESTIVAL AT UCSD

The public has discovered that, contrary to popular belief, it has a surprising appetite for what is different and new in the arts--at least when the new arts are presented in a context of excellence.

Witness the unlikely successes of the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave festival, the 1984 Olympic Arts Festival in Los Angeles, the new music facet of the Aspen Music Festival, and the Cabrillo Festival in Aptos, Calif., to mention a few.

Now comes the Pacific Ring Festival. It is an eclectic event that promises to bring together innovative and traditional arts and artists at a level of quality that may equal the popular celebration of the contemporary arts in Los Angeles two years ago.

A one-time affair, the Pacific Ring Festival will juxtapose innovation, technology, ensemble and ideas about collaboration in the cultures of Pacific Rim countries in the context of the arts. The festival opens Tuesday and runs through May 9 at UC San Diego.

It will not have the depth of international, or even national, talent that made the Los Angeles festival such a staggering collective of arts stars. Instead, this festival will limit its participants to those who have grown up with, or have been associated with, life on the shores of the Pacific Ocean.

With music as its primary focus, the UCSD festival still will provide a variety of talent--from Guatemalan composer Joaquin Orellana’s outlandish innovations that merge folk-music traditions with radio gadgetry and his own instruments, to artworks representative of young contemporary Japanese visual artists.

American modern music guru John Cage and video artists Nam June Paik and Ed Emshwiller will discuss their works, as will San Diego’s wacko musical performance duo (The).

The acclaimed avant garde Suzuki Company of Toga, which combines new and orthodox performance techniques, will stage in Japanese “Clytemnestra,” a new work, based on the ancient Greek plays of Aeschylus and Euripides.

Other concerts will feature the music of expatriate American composer Conlon Nancarrow. An innovator and recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant who now lives in Mexico City, Nancarrow composes primarily for the player piano because musicians can’t handle the 175-note-a-second pieces he sometimes writes.

The reclusive Nancarrow will attend to talk about his works.

Side by side with such musical innovators as Robert Erickson, Morton Subotnick and Joji Yuasa, and the San Diego Partch Ensemble of decidedly strange-looking instruments, will be performances by such cultural traditionalists as Javanese- and Balinese-style gamelans (musical ensembles using bamboo xylophones, gongs and other percussion instruments) and Philippine folk dancers.

But a question eventually arises: Isn’t this electronic stuff a bit esoteric for the average American?

Not at all, according to Roger Reynolds, the UCSD composer and a key figure in coordinating the festival. The opposite is much closer to the truth, Reynolds maintains.

“Little by little, the music world at large is having to admit that two-thirds of the music comes to us through electronics,” Reynolds said. “Two-thirds of what we hear is not live. We do ourselves a disservice if we don’t face that fact.”

More importantly, he added, is the kind of music heard in concert halls. The vast majority of that, too, is a product of sensibilities and techniques “of societies very remote from us in time and space.”

“The basic ideas such as form and melody were sketched out more than 100 years ago,” he said.

Reynolds, whose office is papered with posters for music festivals from Paris to New York in which his compositions have been played, disagrees that music is a universal language.

“It’s a universal phenomenon,” he said.

One purpose of the festival is to bring out the vastly different processes from which different cultures produce music. We can learn a great deal about other cultures through their arts, Reynolds believes.

“The simple Japanese tea ceremony will tell you more about that culture--the attention to detail--than a year of studying the language,” Reynolds said. “Through the Javanese gamelan you can get a sense of their ideas about beauty, grace and performance.”

The Pacific Ring Festival came about as an afterthought.

When UCSD, known primarily for its programs devoted to the hard sciences, planned a series of events around its 25th anniversary this year, the arts departments were initially overlooked, Reynolds said. When that was pointed out, the music department was given a budget, now in six figures, and told to do something.

The campus-based (The), consisting of trumpeter Edwin Harkins and baritone Philip Larson, had a National Endowment for the Arts grant for a collaborative piece with Cage and Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu.

Reynolds and Harkins decided that the piece, along with the recently created Graduate School of International Relations in Pacific Rim Countries, provided the perfect focus for a festival.

The method used in their collaboration is instructive:

The piece began with (The) sending Cage a videotape of a past collaboration. Cage’s response was to write a mesostic, or poem that can be read vertically and horizontally, which he sent to Takemitsu. Takemitsu’s first input to the process was a poem by a contemporary Japanese poet, an audiotape, a two-color graphic and instructions for converting it all to sound and movement, which he returned to (The).

More rounds followed, and the result, titled “Vis-a-Vis,” will be performed for the first time at 8 p.m. Tuesday.

Reynolds wanted to limit the focus to the Pacific Rim countries because of the development of relations among these states.

“There is no group of nations that is so vast and so populous,” Reynolds said. “Trade with them has long surpassed that over the Atlantic. In the future, it will be the focus of a lot of war making, culture making and history making.

“And San Diego is the perfect place to have this kind of festival. We face the East. We’re at the border between Latin America and North America.”

In addition to the five main events--all will be held in Mandeville Center Auditorium except “Clytemnestra,” which will be in the Mandell Weiss Center for the Performing Arts--the festival includes student concerts, special events, discussion panels and films. Paik has been commissioned to create a video work by the Stuart Foundation. It will be unveiled at 2 p.m. Tuesday at the media center.

The next day at noon, Paik and Cage will discuss the effect of technology on their art.

The primary visual-art elements associated with the festival are the hand-cut, paper architectural facades by contemporary Mexican artist Humberto Spindola, (through May 11), followed by an exhibit of five contemporary Japanese artists, May 16 through June 22, at UCSD’s Mandeville Art Gallery.

“We thought it would be different not to show traditional Japanese art,” gallery director Gerry McAllister said. “This will give us a chance to see what contemporary artists are doing in that exciting country.”

Reynolds is proud of the festival’s poster artwork. Most festivals have some snazzy graphic as a logo. The Pacific Ring’s “logo,” a three-color circular abstraction, was conceived by abstract artist Sam Francis, who thought enough of the idea to donate the artwork. “When I see what Sam Francis did for this festival, I am inspired,” Reynolds said. “It’s the East and West--a ring of fire--the Pacific. That is not just a graphic statement. It’s alive and happening right now.”