Sounds Across the Nation : New Music America goes multi-city, with a micro-opera and art rock in L.A.

So what do a piano dropped from an airplane in Portland, Me., minimalism father figure Terry Riley in Atlanta, a micro-opera in Venice on the L.A. riots and the Prism Saxophone Quartet in Honolulu all have in common?

They represent some of the events taking place next weekend as part of the “New Music Across America” festival, more than 100 concerts ranging from contemporary classical through world music and art rock. Created in 1979 by the New Music Alliance, the festival in the past has been a single-city affair known as New Music America, beginning in New York and traveling annually around North America, with Los Angeles the site in 1985.

In its single-city form, however, the festival hit a wall in 1990. That year’s event in Montreal cost $1.2 million and took about three years to organize, says composer Tina Davidson, president of the New Music Alliance.

“After that, there was nobody who would do it in 1991,” she says. “We wanted to rethink the idea and emerge like a phoenix with something different, yet still the same.”

The result is this multi-city expansion of simultaneous festivals. The alliance has done national publicity and fund-raising, regranting money to the presenters it has licensed across the country. Each is responsible for its own programming, although expected to adhere to the sensibilities of past New Music America festivals.

“Another stipulation is that each presenter must have at least one event focused on artists within their community,” Davidson says. Which leads to “Collage Culture: My Neighborhood,” among the local offerings.

“My Neighborhood” is a micro-opera, as director Alan Nakagawa calls the performance pieces from the collaborative Collage Ensemble.

“Of course, micro means short--40 minutes max, for us,” Nakagawa says in defining his term. “After that, to me it is kind of like an effort to consolidate all the performance art and multimedia work in the ‘80s. The term opera is used in its original context of works , to legitimize it in the popular culture, but without compromising it in terms of messages and multiple layers.”

The Collage Ensemble members are visual artists--including a magician--as well as musicians. Besides Nakagawa, they are Geeta Sharma, Steven M. Irving, Tanya Chen and Mark Matsumoto.

“The whole multi issue is kind of remote for us, because where we come from, multiculturalism is just another word for life,” Nakagawa says.

In addition to its own voices, Collage has drawn on texts from Venice High School students in the creation of this piece, and also uses many names, such as Malibu , Cucamonga and Topanga , that came from the Gabrieleno Indians of this region. The simple set design features slide projections of the Pico-Crenshaw area.

Nakagawa is pragmatic in his expectations of a micro-opera exploring multiethnic concerns in the aftermath of the riots.

“I don’t think we’re coming up with the answer,” he says, “but with an attitude that might be an answer. This is more like an empowerment piece. It starts by substantiating the history of where we are, and what it could be like in the future--kind of like a visual prayer piece.”

Initially, Nakagawa wrote the music for “My Neighborhood,” but it changed through collaboration with his colleagues, becoming a group effort. It is scored for piano, percussion, violin and voices--all acoustic, unlike his earlier micro-operas.

“We wanted to go back to hand-touched music,” Nakagawa says. “It is visually interesting onstage, and there is a certain human contact made when people see that. There are also acoustical harmonic qualities that are very difficult to get on a budget with digital instruments.

“I went to Japan, living out in the country for two years, and kind of lost my love of digital instruments. Then during the riots, our neighborhood was without electricity, and I had to give them up!”

“Collage Culture: My Neighborhood” has its premiere Saturday afternoon at Beyond Baroque in Venice, on a program shared with Arturo Cipriano’s fusion ensemble Ya Vals Gran Juju Con Tu Mitote. That evening Beyond Baroque plays host to Birdsongs of the Mesozoic, an improvising art-rock quartet.

The other local components of New Music Across America are a free program of interactive electronic music Friday evening at the Electronic Cafe in Santa Monica; an afternoon of music from saxophonist Jane Ira Bloom and tape-video works by Maggi Payne at the Barnsdall Art Park Gallery Theater in Hollywood next Sunday, and the Oct. 5 performance featuring Anthony Braxton and the CalArts New Century Players, which opens the Monday Evening Concert series at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

“This is a co-presentation between us and CalArts,” says Emily Hay, music curator at Beyond Baroque and a veteran of the 1990 New Music America festival in Montreal. “I think they invited CalArts and Beyond Baroque to balance each other out. Beyond Baroque is the inner-city, struggling organization, while CalArts is a well-funded, high-profile institution.

“For Beyond Baroque, it was sort of an honor to be recognized for presenting new music, because we’ve been doing it for years with little money or publicity. In the future, it will cause us to be more involved in a network of presenters, and to utilize resources more effectively.”

That is also the hope of the New Music Alliance.

“We’re turning our eye more to presenters, with community-building goals in mind,” Davidson says. “The alliance wants to be a real think tank. Our idea now is to have a very free approach to what the festival can be. I think most probably we will do another Across America festival in four or five years.

“We’re trying to get away from the idea of perpetuating one idea again and again. Part of the goal is to encourage presenters to come out--sort of like after a firestorm, in this very difficult political climate--and make connections. This is our art of the future.”

Nakagawa believes the riots may have given L.A.’s arts community a push in that direction.

“What happened to the arts organizations as they progressed in Los Angeles? They became so wrapped up in budgets and sustaining their own activities that they lost all touch with the real world,” he says, answering his own question.

“We have been pushed into outreach into the non-arts world--that’s something where the riots helped. Paradoxically, it may have nothing to do with art itself, but it has everything to do with what art should be all about.”