Argentine Composer to Open Museum Season : Music: The ubiquitous Alicia Terzian and her group will present Latin-American art music at LACMA and Cal State Northridge.

Forget the unequal opportunities of women. Forget the recognized obstacles to popularizing serious new music.

Neither applies to composer Alicia Terzian, who--with her Grupo Encuentros de Musica Contemporanea--flies in from Buenos Aires to open the 52nd Monday Evening Concert season at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

This particular dynamo manages to pretend that she is promoting such widely appealing music as the Beatles, rather than the atonal avant-garde variety of which she is an exponent.

“And why not?” asks the artist-impresaria by phone in Argentina. “After working in this field for 22 years I should have something to show for it.”

That she does. Much more than other practitioners, especially those “excellent (new music) specialists in Los Angeles who are amazingly unknown to their public.”

Since founding her 15-member ensemble in 1978, Terzian has gained the sponsorship of Buenos Aires’ biggest newspaper, El Chronista Comercial, which also owns a cable-TV channel and radio station. She feels particularly grateful for the support “because my country is so poor.”

She has made two recordings, appeared in 70 festivals throughout Europe, the Soviet Union, China and the Americas, and been awarded France’s Academie de Palmes, among other prizes.

Last year one of her concerts in Buenos Aires drew more than 1,000 people, although average attendance is roughly 300.

But it is her all-embracing approach, as opposed to the small-cult identity many new-music composers take, that has proven so successful.

“My Encounters Group is not a thing unto itself,” she says.

“I invite philosophers, painters and poets for big discussions on the culture of our time. As a result, we attract the most intelligent audiences--a public made up of young people, university students. And even if they do not come primarily for the music, we are able to do our proselytizing.”

Terzian, who teaches at three conservatories in addition to finding time to compose, rehearse, hold office in various international music societies and do the necessary public relations for expanding her horizons, sees herself as “the mother of them all.”

She has scheduled one of her own pieces tonight, along with entries by fellow Argentines. She will present another concert of Latin-American art music in Campus Theater at Cal State Northridge at 8 p.m. Thursday. Both concerts will present work by Aurelio de la Vega, a Cuban-American resident of the San Fernando Valley.

“I re-encountered Alicia on a trip to Buenos Aires,” says the veteran, Northridge-based composer, “and found her truly amazing. To think that she has radio programs, teaches all those students, prepares concerts, holds office and composes makes one think of Wonder Woman. She has done for Latin-American art music what no one else could.”

Once the favored student of Alberto Ginastera, she wrote a violin concerto in her second year under his tutelage and she says she has composed no fewer than 49 other works.

“Independence was one of the things he admired in me,” she says. “I did not copy him and I encourage my students to find their own voice, their own expression. That’s the heart of any creative pursuit as I see it and especially of music.”

Asked to explain where all her drive and optimism come from, Terzian doesn’t have a simple answer.

“But the quest for personal expression is very powerful in me, and I hope it’s contagious for others. . . .”