MUSIC : A Scaled-Down CalArts Festival

Outwardly, the CalArts Contemporary Music Festival last weekend was a relatively modest affair. Twelfth in an annual series at the Valencia arts manufactory, it seemed small in scope and stature compared to some of its predecessors and showed worrisome hints of retrenchment and decline.

But the experience of it proved that, for festivals at least, less really may be more. It was certainly easier to assimilate, and there was far less chaff among the wheat.

Framing the otherwise largely in-house festivities were concerts devoted to veteran avant-gardist Mauricio Kagel. The 56-year-old Argentine has built an unclassifiable career as composer, performer, dramatist, film maker and teacher--in the last capacity significantly as professor of new music theater at the Cologne Musikhochschule since 1974.

Though largely self-taught as a composer, Kagel reveals the strong influence of Stockhausen and the Darmstadt school in his music. He is best known--where known at all here as these were his first appearances in Los Angeles in 25 years--for highly structured performance art pieces, combining music with sharply defined visual elements.

Kagel’s two programs were much revised and altered up to the last minute. Such changes are not at all unusual in contemporary music concerts, least of all in festival settings, where all manner of scheduling conflicts and practical impediments occur. The early deletion of Kagel’s “Kontra-Danse Ballet” from the opening program happened because the CalArts Dance Ensemble had too many other commitments to handle the assignment, according to Nicholas England, acting president of CalArts.

“Kantrimiusik,” however, was struck from the final concert the afternoon it was to be performed. England said the decision was Kagel’s, after amplification problems delayed the final rehearsal until one of the performers had to leave to honor another engagement. Not long afterward, Kagel emphasized the importance of an ethical commitment to the music on the part of performers and the need for extensive rehearsal preparation, in an open pre-concert discussion.

In any case, there was certainly an unrivaled intensity and precision in the performance of “Dressur” Friday (repeating a program offered Thursday to launch the festival). Percussionists Amy Knoles, Arthur Jarvinen and David Johnson were coached and directed by Jean-Pierre Drouet, one of the performers at the premiere in Metz in 1977, and were obviously both thoroughly committed and well rehearsed.

“Dressur,” Kagel said, was an attempt to “musicalize the relationships of a society of three.” It employs both music and imagery from the circus, in a percussionist’s nightmare of intricate timing. The movement is as rigorously shaped and interactive as the sounds, and as stylized as a Medieval dance of death.

There were moments of humor in “Dressur”--Knoles attempting a flamenco dance in clogs, with clogs on her hands replacing castanets; Jarvinen threatening Johnson with a lion-tamer’s chair--but it was a humor near hysteria, with a barely leashed sense of icy neurosis.

“Presentation” is a companion piece to “Dressur,” from a quadripartite set called “Quatre Degres.” Like “Dressur,” it deals with a show-biz function of music, and like “Dressur” it was offered in its U.S. premiere.

Unlike “Dressur,” however, the desperate parody in “Presentation” is blatantly overt. Rodger Henderson played a stereotypically sleazy cocktail-lounge emcee, left to disintegrate onstage when the singer he announces does not appear. Pianist Blaise Bryski is the cabaret band, playing a steady, obsessive music that connects with Henderson only in insistent demands for help turning pages.

As directed by Irene Connors, Henderson’s show-must-go-on abasement, poignant as she and he made it, became the center of a monodrama sketch. Kagel seemed to intend some comment on our expectations and (mis)use of music, but tawdry personal despair was all that came through.

With the removal of “Kantrimiusik,” “Exotica” closed the festival Sunday evening. A partly ironic, partly celebratory world music hoedown, “Exotica” was dedicated to “the sixth sense,” and commissioned for the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich.

The previously consistently dimly lit Modular Theatre blossomed brightly for “Exotica,” and the performers traded in the standard all-black garb for white, vaguely ethnic costumes. Here Kagel’s characteristic visual pizazz was confined mostly to the imposing array of non-Western instruments, but the change in lighting alone served as a climactic statement of sorts.

Musically, “Exotica” is a half-hour collage of hoots and hollers, as six non-specialists confront their choice of 10 foreign instruments each. Members of the California E.A.R. Unit held nothing back, but director Drouet made their efforts sound almost pallid when he played his own gutturally growling, pulsating solo as an encore.

Replacing “Kantrimiusik” on short notice were two pieces of comparatively absolute concert music. David Peck gave a taut, rapt account of the mesmeric concert etude “An Tasten,” and cellist Erika Duke and pianist Gaylord Mowrey carefully and sonorously shaped the moody antiphonalities of “Unguis Incarnatus Est.” Both pieces had been rehearsed under Kagel’s supervision for a private performance earlier that week.

On the first program, “Atem” substituted for “Kontra-Danse.” Miles Anderson moaned and groaned with his trombone, in an uninvolving bit of performance art angst.

Kagel and Drouet excepted, most of the composers and performers at the festival were CalArts faculty, students or alums. The inbreeding, however, produced a strong concert, in honor of Mel Powell’s 65th birthday.

Powell has been a major figure at CalArts since the beginning, in 1972, and his music has never been in short supply there. In fact, he had an evening devoted to his music at the 1985 festival, where two of the works heard this year were also performed.

CalArts spared every expense but no imagination in contriving an intriguing setting for the concert, trusting a dim but varied lighting scheme to cover cheap materials. The audience entered the Modular Theatre through a blue tunnel, to gaze upon a multilevel set of compartments curtained by hanging sheets.

The sheets lifted to reveal performers for each number, in an effect pleasantly like opening birthday packages. The process also minimized dead time between numbers, and though the results at times looked like laundry day in a warehouse, it also contributed to the expectant atmosphere.

Each half of the “then and now” program, wisely and wittily annotated by the composer, began with an early neo-Classical work. Todor Pelev and Susan Allen played the elegant Divertimento for Violin and Harp smoothly, and the wonderfully perky Divertimento for Winds received an equally gracious reading from Rachel Ruddich, flute; Vicky Velich, oboe; William Powell, clarinet; Eirikur Palsson, trumpet; and Julie Feves, bassoon.

The latter group, with French hornist Kurt Snyder replacing Palsson, stayed on for the characteristically evanescent Woodwind Quintet, premiered at the 1985 festival. Powell’s recent works set evocatively scored wisps in well-crafted constructs, making terse statements with a rich vocabulary of allusion and gesture.

The title “Setting,” suggestive as it is of poetry, jewelry and craftsmanship, well labels Powell’s music. Stuart Fox played the Setting for Guitar, Bryan Pezzone and Trina Dye Ballinger the Setting for Two Pianos, and soprano Judith Bettina sang the “Strand Settings: ‘Darker’.” All achieved the paradoxical but utterly essential quality of incisive delicacy.

Peter Ioannou conducted the large ensemble for Modules, another title descriptive of Powell’s methods, in a performance of inspired translucence. Bettina, Duke and percussionist Amy Knoles each offered a short solo “Overnight” piece with appropriate panache.

Capping the evening was a gift from Milton Babbitt, a short piece “In His Own Words,” allowing Bettina to quote Powell against a murmurous piano accompaniment played by Gaylord Mowrey. As one line said, “Originality is merely one thing; mastery is something else.”

Mastery in another area was apparent earlier, when nine of Powell’s current and recent students offered a surprisingly varied program of short tributes. Peter Zaferes’ fluid, sinuously polyphonic Duet (Karin Hoesli, flute; Tim Bonenfant, clarinet) and Lori Dobbins’ expressive “Prelude to Winter” (Bettina and Mowrey) proved closest to Powell’s own style.

The darkling drama of Mark Waldrep’s Morphism IV for percussion and electronics (Knoles) and Randy Hostetler’s hilariously gimmicky “8” (Hostetler, piano) were more stylistically remote, but no less carefully constructed. Bob Clendenen, Hilmar Thordarson, Ron Sappington, Cesar Mateus and Pedro Guajardo were the other contributors to the program, of distinctive pieces capably played.

In the Main Gallery prior to that tribute concert was a performance of the winning compositions of the Freeman Competition.

Live electronic manipulation of some sort was the tie that bound Carl Stone’s “Hop Ken,” Dorothy Stone’s “Wizard Ball,” and Reed Holmes’ Toccata. “Hop Ken” processed phrases from “Pictures at an Exhibition” in a flashy, stuttering pops orgy; “Wizard Ball” made a haunted, chittering dance for flute; Toccata proved a potent interplay of bravura, iterative pianism with shifting tape delay. The Stones (not related) performed their own works, Bryan Pezzone played Holmes’ Toccata.

The other major concert of the festival was offered by the E.A.R. Unit Sunday afternoon, also in the Main Gallery. David Ocker’s quasi-minimal “Pride and Foolishness,” for mixed sextet, has the dark grace of some jazz arrangements of Bach, compounded in equal measure of minor mode moodiness and insistent rhythmic swing. The other ensemble work, Todd Brief’s “Idols,” proved considerably less direct, attenuated in spirit though effectively scored.

Eric Chasalow’s “Hanging in the Balance” offered vivid, orotund opportunities to cellist Erika Duke, in pursuit of taped phantoms. “The Seven Golden Vampires” by Arthur Jarvinen works powerfully as a progressively shaped harmonic etude for two pianos, deftly played by Lorna Eder and Mowrey. David Lang’s “Illumination Rounds” sent Mowrey in strident chase of violinist Robin Lorentz in a twisting, hammering study.

Saturday and Sunday, the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States offered 15 hours of taped music, before, during and after other concerts. Performances by students and a late-night improvisation by saxophonist David Liebman and percussionist John Bergamo completed the official festival docket, which this year was augmented by its own Fringe Festival.

The festival that was must be counted an artistic success. But a festival that wasn’t shadowed the weekend.

The changes to the planned Kagel prgorams removed two major works which would have had their first U.S. performances. The Powell program offered no new works, the E.A.R. Unit concert listed only one premiere, and even the Freeman Competition pieces have been heard before.

Excepting Kagel, most of the music was composed by members of the CalArts extended family. The E.A.R. Unit program went farthest afield in that regard. Two of the three victors in the Freeman Competition were former CalArts students.

The circle of performers was even more sharply circumscribed. Pianist Majella Stockhausen--daughter of the noted German composer--and composer/conductor John Adams were slated to appear, with only scheduling conflicts cited to explain their late withdrawals from the festival.

Even the audiences seemed to come mostly from the immediate CalArts community. Except for the Powell celebration, the festival events played to half-full rooms, which has not always been the case in the past.

CalArts administration has been in a period of transition this year, following the departure of Robert Fitzpatrick to head Disney’s European operation. Music dean Nicholas England moved up to acting president, with festival director Frans van Rossum becoming music dean. Steven Lavine, who takes over as the new president this summer, made a brief appearance to laud festival patron Betty Freeman.

Whether the festival this year represents a new, inward redirection of the annual effort, or only a confluence of purely practical--and temporary--constraints, remains to be seen. The narrower focus was not without gains, producing an assimilable, satisfying, invigorating experience. The performances by the local heroes were invariably tight and compelling.

The real excitement of the Kagel concerts, however, was missing from much of the rest of the festival. New music need not-- should not--invariably be a tense, taut encounter with the unknown. In a festival context, though, that thrilling edge of experiment and adventure should not be missing. Next year. . .