FESTIVAL AT CAL-ARTS TAKES A DIFFERENT TACK : TRIBUTE TO JOHN CAGE

Native Angeleno John Cage will be 75 in September, and big doings are planned locally. On Sunday, CalArts got a jump on the celebration, with a tribute concert concluding the Contemporary Music Festival.

Cage describes art as a social process, though he has always been reluctant to serve as activity director. He’s happy to introduce you to some sounds, but often leaves any further relationship to chance and the openness of the listener.

That was the case with “Etcetera” (1973). An 80-minute exercise in aesthetic forbearance and posterior endurance on the hard seats of the Modular Theater, “Etcetera” went far toward emptying a theater that began full.

The CalArts 20th-Century Players served as a pool of communal soloists. They were free to play modest solos, gently tap cardboard boxes, or gather in small units for enervated ensemble efforts, while a tape of bird chirps and airplane noises played.

For Cage, music means never having to mean anything, and “Etcetera” doesn’t mean anything with a vengeance. One can admire the gentle spirit that revels in random toots and thumps, while sympathizing with the insufficiently mellow who fled.

On the other hand, Cage has also written sassy pieces like “Credo in US.” Composed in 1942 for Merce Cunningham, it has purposeful shape, driving energy, and a nose-thumbing, out-with-the-old-in-with-the-new insouciance.

Integrated with a jazzy piano part that forecast minimalist loops, and boldly impertinent percussion--mostly tin cans and an electric buzzer--is a part for phonograph. For this performance, Erika Duke roughed up some recorded Tchaikovsky, in brisk cooperation with percussionists Amy Knoles and Arthur Jarvinen, and pianist Gaylord Mowrey, under the guidance of Dorothy Stone.

For something completely different, there was the California E.A.R. Unit’s manic rendering of “Theater Piece.” Here the composer provides a form for creative chaos--a six-ring circus of the absurd. Feathers dropped on the audience, a cello played with carrots, popcorn cooked, etc. A psychoanalyst would have been as delighted as the composer obviously was when called on stage.