Music and Dance : CalArts Contemporary Music Festival Opens

The CalArts Contemporary Music Festival this year may be only a faint echo of past glories, but its collective ear is clearly on the future. There was more artifice than art in the opening programs, but the technologies surveyed dazzled in their own right and hold much promise.

Interactive was the word in trendy neighborhoods Friday and Saturday. Most of the processes blurred the distinctions between active and passive, input and output, with techniques that seem to liberate both musicians and machines.

Would that the musical imagination displayed equaled the engineering. However transparent the interfaces have become, however responsive the hardware, the impact on music-making remains quantitative rather than qualitative.

The festival began Friday with a free-wheeling demonstration program at the Electronic Cafe in Santa Monica. Computer music guru and paterfamilias Max Mathews was represented by his voice and image transmitted from Stanford University, and by his latest creation, the Radio Baton.

The physical instrument consists simply of two batons containing radio transmitters, which are manipulated over a flat receiving surface that Mathews calls the “pizza box” for obvious reasons. Information from the movement of the batons over the conducting surface controls a pre-programmed score in the computer.

Mathews’ idea is to make the computer responsible for reproducing the notes, leaving the performer free to concentrate on expressive nuances.

The Radio Baton was clearly and engagingly presented by Richard Boulanger, from the Berklee College of Music in Boston. Boulanger used excerpts from music he wrote for the new instrument--including accompanying himself in a gently haunting song on a Hesse text--as well as bits of Chopin and Bach, and the efforts of an audience volunteer in his demonstration.

Saturday in the Modular Theatre at CalArts, Boulanger and the Radio Baton were featured again in his “I Know of No Geometry.” Gracefully and tunefully constructed from a nine-tone scale invented by John Pierce, the piece displayed the baton’s ability to mold warm, liquid sounds.

The other work presented Friday, following an introduction to home-education software from the Voyager Company, was “The Becoming Orchid” by composer Mark Coniglio and dancer Tanya Hinkel. Coniglio has devised a system using information from sensors attached to a dancer’s body to trigger computer-controlled musical events.

In the cramped performing environment, “Becoming” suggested an etude cataloguing possibilities. Choreographically crabbed and melodramatic, it draws sonically on portentous spoken words and conventional electronica.

One of the issues raised in the telephone interview with Mathews was the place of virtuosity in electronic music. The following night pianists David Rosenboom and Chris Brown and trombonist George Lewis gave athletic lessons in the continuing power of sheer note production.

Rosenboom, new dean of the CalArts School of Music, offered Part VI of his “Systems of Judgment.” Seated at a MIDI piano and surrounded by electronic gear, Rosenboom pounded out a complex array of multi-stylistic passages, extended by computer commentary.

Stepping out from the audience, Lewis injected a dry, welcome humor into the proceedings, and then blew a wide if not infallibly mesmerizing range of passage work from his trombone. He circled around his listeners, his orotund efforts tripping embellished echoes from his computer setup.

Lewis and Rosenboom later combined in a long, often frenzied free-jazz improvisation. Their tremendous outpourings left both computer systems sounding wan indeed in comparison to the live fireworks.

Brown proved equally commanding at the piano keyboard in his glib pop vehicle “Hall of Mirrors,” and raised the reactive role of his electronics to an almost formative level.

At the end came an excerpt from Morton Subotnick’s “Hungers,” the technological tour de force of the 1987 Los Angeles Festival. Joan La Barbara crooned and cried intensely, creating a powerful emotional vacuum, filled with brooding, lyric austerity by cellist Erika Duke.