Alsop to Lead American Music Fest : Music: The annual event in Eugene, Ore., set for August, will focus on Gershwin this year.

Conductor Marin Alsop will be the focus of a contemporary music festival scheduled here Aug. 19, 20 and 22.

Billed as Oregon’s Festival of American Music, the annual event will specialize in contemporary music as delivered by Alsop, who in November was the first woman to conduct an L.A. Philharmonic subscription concert.

For her first festival, Alsop plans a program that will focus on composer George Gershwin’s influence on serious American music. Future festivals are expected to be center on other traditions and themes.

Alsop, who will serve as the festival’s artistic director and conductor, said she was so keen on doing an American music festival that she “would have done it anywhere. But Eugene, for me, is the most ideal place.”

The new festival is scheduled to be Alsop’s second of the summer. She will be named later this week as the music director and conductor of the Cabrillo Music Festival in Santa Cruz County, Aug. 5-15.

The Eugene festival, announced Friday night, is the latest project for Alsop, who, as the music director and conductor of the Eugene Symphony, spends about a third of her time here. She resides in New York City, where she leads two orchestras that she founded: String Fever, an all-female string jazz group, and Concordia, a 50-member crossover orchestra that has its own series at Lincoln Center. She is also music director and conductor of the Long Island Philharmonic and a frequent guest conductor.

Alsop signed a five-year contract with the new music festival on Friday that will assure her presence here long after her contract with the Eugene Symphony expires in 1994.

This year, the festival will have three events:

* Aug. 19: A lecture on “The Serious Side of Gershwin and His Contemporaries” by Alsop.

* Aug. 20: A concert of Gershwin’s chamber opera “Blue Monday,” his piano and string quartets and some obscure songs.

* Aug. 22: An outdoor orchestral concert of Paul Whiteman’s version of the Concerto in F and original orchestrations of Broadway show tunes.

Curiously enough, while the festival is headed by the Eugene Symphony’s 35-year-old conductor, it is not a symphony project. Sponsorship is by a new organization called Oregon’s Festival of American Music Inc.

“By naming it Oregon’s Festival of American Music, we want it to appeal to people all over the West Coast,” said the festival’s executive director, Irene Alltucker of Eugene.

While the scope of future festivals will be determined by the success of the initial offering, Alsop said the organization intends to eventually encompass two weeks of concerts (of established and specially commissioned works) and related activities (lectures, workshops, master classes, etc.).