Festival’s 1st Week Looks at Avant-Garde : CalArts: The annual spring event will feature two cutting-edge operas, an oratorio and a conference on automated instruments.

Two veterans of the avant-garde and a conference on automated instruments highlight this year’s episode of the annual CalArts Spring Music Festival.

The first week of the two-week festival, which begins March 27, will feature two operas by Robert Ashley. Although his works have rarely been performed in Southern California, Ashley has been a major player on the new music scene since the early 1960s, when he and visual artists combined forces to stage large-scale works incorporating electronic music, light projections, dance and sculpture.

He calls his works operas, even though much of the dialogue in them is spoken rather than sung. The movement is often minimal, sometimes featuring only hand gestures. And his plots are more complex than anything conceived by Wagner.

“Improvement (Don Leaves Linda),” the first of Ashley’s operas to be done during the festival, is essentially a subplot of his opera called “Now Eleanor’s Idea.” In “Improvement,” Don (who in an earlier opera is a robber who conspires to take all the money from a bank and then return it the same day) leaves Linda for a character called Now Eleanor because people keep addressing her as “Now, Eleanor. . . .”

Linda pops up as an airline ticket agent who interrogates Don, but then runs off with an Italian man who tap-dances and lectures on the philosophy of pasta.

And that’s just Act One.

But as confusing as the plots can get, Ashley has been highly praised for creating moody, humorous vignettes that manage to be philosophical, spiritual and quite moving.

The other Ashley work on the schedule is “el/Aficionado,” which is a spy story.

Frederick Rzewski is not only known as a composer, but also as a pianist who can handle the sometimes fiendishly dense, complex passages in contemporary works. Musicologist Nicolas Slonimsky wrote that Rzewski is “capable of depositing huge boulders of sonoristic material across the keyboard without actually wrecking the instrument.”

It’s not surprising that many of his works, which first gained notoriety in the 1960s, were written for keyboards, but he also has written several oratorios and other vocal works, often on political themes. His “Coming Together,” which takes its text from a letter written by an Attica State Prison inmate, was presented a few years back at the Ojai Music Festival.

At CalArts, where Rzewski has been in residence this year, his “The Triumph of Death” oratorio will be staged. It is based on a Peter Weiss play about war crimes at Auschwitz.

The second week of the festival features discussions, demonstrations and performances by composers who work with automated instruments, such as computerized pianos. Composers taking part include Morton Subotnick, Tod Machover, David Rosenboom and, through a telelink from his home in Mexico City, Conlon Nancarrow.

This section of the festival will include a sound installation by the German-born composer who uses just one name, Trimpin. His installation will feature several percussion instruments, suspended from the ceiling, that will be controlled by computers and also interact with visitors.

The CalArts Spring Music Festival runs from March 27 to April 11 on the campus in Valencia and at several venues in Los Angeles, including the Pacific Design Center, Watts Towers, Japan-America Theatre and Barnsdall Park. Several of the events are free; others range in price from $2 to $13. Call (818) 367-5507 or (805) 253-7832.