MUSIC REVIEW : Down Under Theme Fails to Surface : Concert: It was difficult to discern a distinctive Australian component in a chamber concert devoted to new music from Australia and New Zealand, part of a six-day festival at San Diego State University.

The formula for writing American music, according to the late Virgil Thomson, is uncomplicated. All you have to do is be American, and anything you compose is ipso facto American music.

By this simple criterion, Sunday evening’s chamber concert “Music Down Under” at San Diego State University’s Smith Recital Hall was quintessentially Australian. Everything except, of course, “Five Melodies for Piano” by Jack Body, who is from New Zealand.

This opening performance of SDSU’s modest, six-day festival devoted to new music from Australia and New Zealand demonstrated that contemporary Australian music is as international as most contemporary architecture.

The seven earnest works played by members of the SDSU music faculty could have been attributed to composers from England, Germany or the United States without raising an eyebrow. And Peter Sculthorpe’s “Songs of Sky And Sea,” the sole work that might have exuded a bit of identifying local color because it is based on an aboriginal tune from the island of Saibai off northern Australia, sounded like Aaron Copland dressing up an American folk tune in Sunday-go-to-meeting duds.

To the credit of festival organizer David Ward-Steinman, however, each of the other composers selected did speak with a distinctive voice.

Mark Pollard’s “Krebs” for solo piano, performed by Ward-Steinman, displayed disparate twitterings and unexpected clusters in a tightly organized framework. Body’s “Five Melodies for Piano” at first sounded like New Age Minimalism programmed through a prepared piano, but these deceptively simple etudes, interpreted by Barbara Scheidker, soon established a bell-like collage of Zen tones that invoked mystical reflection.

The premiere of Gordon Kerry’s subtly crafted “New Music,” a 10-minute cantata for soprano and four instruments (flute, cello, piano and percussion), showed the young composer from Sidney in a favorable light. Despite Gwen Harwood’s mildly rhetorical text, soprano Ann Chase turned her solo line into a shimmering vocalise that delicately hovered over the accompaniment’s spare, evanescent themes and whirring ostinatos. Kerry’s programmatic quotation of the ubiquitous Pachelbel “Canon” went on just a bit too long, but the rest of the structure was suitably taut. This engaging cantata deserves to be part of a larger cycle, like Schoenberg’s “Pierrot Lunaire,” to which all such contemporary vocal pieces are indebted. Violist Karen Elaine infused Kerry’s brooding “Parardi” for viola and piano with equal melodic grace.

Felix Werder, a German composer who emigrated to Australia about 50 years ago, evidently has forgotten none of his astringent serialist indoctrination. His abrasive “Off Beat” for cello and piano, written in 1990, could have been fabricated out of Schoenberg’s discarded motifs.

On the other hand, Larry Sitsky’s “Arch,” sympathetically played by pianist Karen Follingstad, glowed with dense, post-impressionist harmonies happily free of derivative overtones.

* The festival will continue with additional concerts at 7 p.m. Wednesday and Friday in SDSU’s Smith Recital Hall.