PREVIEW : Indian, Latin American Sounds to Reverberate

Two very different kinds of music from abroad--one type familiar to anyone thirtysomething or older and the other seldom heard in the Southland--will be presented this week at local college concerts.

The first concert, set for tonight in Valencia, will feature traditional Indian music, the cascading mix of sitar, tabla and tamboura introduced to Western ears in the late 1960s by the Beatles and Ravi Shankar. Principal performers will be CalArts professor Amiya Dasgupta, who plays sitar, and guest artist Swapan Chaudhuri, a virtuoso on the set of two tunable drums called the tabla. They will be accompanied on the tamboura, the Indian equivalent of a rhythm guitar, by students of Dasgupta’s.

Dasgupta said interest in Indian music faded but did not die after the Beatles ended their flirtation with it.

“In the ‘60s it was a very new sound and it was a fad,” he said. “The music is not as popular now but it is steady.”

Dasgupta, who has 10 sitar students at CalArts, said he believes that the attraction of Indian music to the Western ear lies in the music’s lyricism and exotic sound.

“There is a lot of gliding from note to note,” he said. “There are so many different kinds of melodies that you can’t get in American music. The rhythm patterns are very different.”

Chaudhuri, also a teacher, is from San Francisco and tours regularly with Ravi Shankar.

The concert begins at 8 tonight at the Bijou Theatre, 24700 McBean Parkway.

Foreign music of a very different sort will be heard Thursday night when Encuentros de Musica Contemporanea de Buenos Aires Ensemble, or Buenos Aires Encounters of Contemporary Music, makes its Los Angeles debut at the Cal State Northridge Campus Theater. The seven-member ensemble plays avant-garde music written primarily by Latin Americans.

While contemporary music by Europeans and Americans is performed regularly in Los Angeles, the counterpart from Latin America is not.

“I had tried to bring them here before, but the cost is tremendous,” said Aurelio de la Vega, a CSUN professor who arranged the appearance. “This time they had other stops on their tour not so far away, so it wasn’t so expensive.”

People expecting music with a Latin beat will be surprised. This is serious or “art” music written by scholarly composers. Seven pieces are on the program, one of them by de la Vega. Nevertheless, he said, a careful listener will know that the works come from south of the border.

“To me the color, the timbre, seem to be different,” he said. “The whole communication process too. Latin music may be more communicative. Some European music written after World War II became so mathematical, so sterile. This is not.”

Formed in 1978, the ensemble is making its 11th U.S. tour. It is led by founder Alicia Terzian, a composer and conductor. The ensemble has commissioned 49 works and performed at festivals across this country and Europe.