CAGE FETE: ‘THE NEXT GENERATION’

John Cage is 75, a fact that can hardly have escaped music patrons of the Los Angeles Festival. After all, the events celebrating the locally born composer’s birthday are the festival’s only classical concert offerings.

The fourth program of the weeklong series, given Monday evening at Japan America Theatre, was titled “The Next Generation,” apparently in reference to the performers. There is considerable irony in that, for with Cage, the avant-garde has gone a long way toward becoming the old guard.

Cage’s ideas loom large in any history of modern music, but one has to wonder about the staying power of his music as a pure listening experience. The young musicians of the CalArts Twentieth Century Players voted against it with their feet, streaming away from the theater at intermission after their work was done.

“Quartets for Orchestra,” an attenuated 1976 deconstruction of eight early American hymn tunes, reminded us at length of how oppressively counterproductive chance operations can be. There was no sense of spontaneity or freedom in the gentle drones, but rather a feeling of an artificial process stubbornly carried through to a foregone anti-conclusion.

Much the same could be said of a simultaneous performance of three indeterminate works--”Atlas Eclipticalis” for orchestra, “Winter Music” played by pianist Bryan Pezzone and “Solo for Voice 45” sung by Joan La Barbara--though operating in a shorter time frame. Stephen Mosko coordinated both “Quartets” and “Atlas.”

“Music for Eight” was another long work, but one much more dramatic in both sound resources and chance counterpoint, reinforced spatially.

“Eight Whiskus” began each half of the program--as a neo-modal folk song sung by La Barbara and as a scratchy, haunted fiddle tune played by Malcolm Goldstein. “Solo for Voice 67” ended the program, shrieked and rasped by La Barbara, with producer Larry Stein whacking an electronic drum in imitation of a pile driver.