MUSIC REVIEW : Depending on View, ‘Custer’ Was Balanced or Indulgent

Like the disappointed art patrons who found no erotic torso in Marcel Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase,” Sunday’s audience at UC San Diego’s “Custer’s Last Cigar” encountered neither Indians nor the defeated general nor his promised cigar. And, like scheduled airline flights in California, UCSD composer John Silber’s stage work was entirely smoke-free.

Any description of Silber’s multimedia opus depends on the viewer’s aesthetic predisposition. From a John Cage “anything goes” perspective, “Custer” was a thoughtfully balanced melange of dance, poetry, music and colorful visual projections in the best performance art tradition. To the jaundiced eye and disciplined ear, however, it was just another stage spectacle composed of equal parts ponderous rhetoric and indulgent improvisation.

Each of Silber’s three acts presented a different and thematically unrelated tableau built around the dancers and accompanied by solo instrumentalists. In the opening act, Xavier Chabot went through a series of yoga master contortions on a center stage mat, while baritone Philip Larson intoned a somber litany of Old Testament prophecy punctuated by military drill commands. In the second act, Chabot was tied to dancer Patty Wong. While the bound duo writhed on the mat, their contortions were monitored by a pair of on-stage video cameras and instantly projected on backstage screens. The final act was. . .more abstract.

It is notable that Silber’s piece was staged on the weekend that San Diego’s Sushi Gallery opened its sixth Neofest, downtown’s annual festival of performance art. Over its 20-year history, the UCSD music department has been a hotbed of such musical-dramatic experimentation, creating new vocabularies for practitioners of the avant-garde. Silber’s homage to the Dadaist improvisers--although they prefer to call their work “the advance of non-notable music”--may also be a kind of swan song, for this strain of music performance is clearly waning on the La Jolla campus.

Silber’s colleague Jean Charles Francois, to whom he dedicated “Custer” and with whom he formed the non-notational performance group KIVA, will leave the university at semester’s end for a two-year stint at the University of Lyons in his native France. And the memory of avant-gardist supreme Pauline Oliveros, now many years departed from the department, is rarely invoked.

Most UCSD new music performances have become sedate, albeit technically accomplished, affairs, pursuing either the Holy Grail of computer-realized exactitude or presenting erudite, post-serial essays for traditional instruments. Against this sober background, Silber’s performance art pastiche was a nostalgic, almost charming remembrance of more freewheeling times at Mandeville Center.