Music Reviews : New Works From UCLA Composers

Contemporary academic music is supposed to be, so a common view has it, serious, cerebral, dissonant, maybe even a little unpleasant to sit through. Not so the six works presented by three UCLA faculty composers at Schoenberg Auditorium Tuesday.

But if, in general, the music eschewed this academic model, it also proved mostly unchallenging to the listener--uninteresting even.

The two works by Ian Krouse turned out an exception to this. His song cycle “Villancicos” Book 1, a setting of 15th-Century Spanish poems for soprano and guitar, is written in a recognizably Spanish-tinged musical language. But the strumming guitar music quickly goes astray into dissonance, halts, starts over and loses its way again. The soprano line floats perilously above in filigree, nervously stretching out single words, breaking into spoken recitation.

Krouse’s “Cuando se abre en la manana,” a brief setting of a Garcia Lorca poem for the same forces, uses a simpler tonal language but rises impressively to an agitated climax. Alba Quezada sang both works with focused lyricism and playfulness with guitarist Terry Graves supporting eloquently.

Roger Bourland’s two works--the Portable Rhapsody No. 1 “Glamour and Eros” for alto saxophone and tape, and the Portable Rhapsody No. 2 “Shasta” for flute and tape--both provide rhythmic, tamely tonal synthesized sounds as backdrop to linear noodlings in the solo instruments. The amplified players, flutist Mark Carlson and saxophonist Kathleen Maxwell, performed solidly but without interpretive shading.

“Holiday Suite,” for violin and piano, is a quaint collection of holiday tunes slightly tampered with by composer Paul Reale. His “Period Piece” for two pianos also uses quotes, most notably of Schubert’s Ninth Symphony, in a hodge-podge of styles from baroque to Stravinsky to Joplin. Both seem practically weightless. Pianists Blaise Bryski and Trina Dye and violinist Kelly Parkinson dispatched the works dutifully.