A Biggs Bash : Listeners received the presents when the Ventura composer threw himself a 60th-birthday celebration.

A sizable throng of music lovers descended on City Hall last Sunday afternoon. The occasion was a party of sorts. John Biggs, Ventura’s most celebrated composer, turned 60, and he celebrated The Big 6-0 by throwing a bash for himself.

The afternoon’s long concert of works from Biggs’ catalogue proved to be the best kind of acknowledgment of a composer’s milestone. To date, a fine lot of musicians have navigated a very selective tour through Biggs’ music.

Although the musical resources were modest, focusing mostly on small choral groupings and a few taped electronic sound sources, the variety and pacing of the program made for a rich musical fete.

The turnout was strong, and the reverberant space was acoustically kind to the choral sounds: The voices seemed to hover about the marbled spaces in City Hall’s atrium.

Aptly, the program began with a composite Mass, with music by 20th-Century composer Hermann Schroeder and the Renaissance composer Monteverdi framing a central credo by Biggs. Significantly, Biggs’ piece was commissioned by the influential choral leader Roger Wagner, who died last month at his home in Camarillo.

For a brief time, with both Wagner and Biggs living here, Ventura County boasted an impressive choral contingent.

“That’s an integral part of my background,” the Catholic-raised composer told the audience. “I was in my teens before I knew there was any other kind of singing in the church.”

Renaissance music has also played a heavy role in forming Biggs’ musical direction, so it was fitting that the concert’s only non-original music was from four centuries ago. Palestrina’s “Lamentations of Jeremiah” had an especially deep, dark resonance, as sung by Biggs and tenors Paul Brian, Carl Zytowsky--from UCSB, whose groups have championed Biggs’ music--and Grey Brothers.

Not one to cut himself off from his archaic influences, Biggs often refers to or appropriates early music.

“I always had an affinity for Orlando Lassus, because he was born exactly 400 years before I was,” he told the audience with a grin before launching into his expanded setting for the Lassus piece “Bon Jour, Mon Coeur.”

And Biggs’ well-known piece “Auction Cries,” he explained, was loosely based on “The Cries of London,” by English Renaissance composer Orlando Gibbons. “Auction Cries” is a wonderful little American jewel, based on a “found” text-a list of items to be auctioned.

Comic relief of a quaint sort is always just around the corner in Biggs’ music. For this program, he pulled out the salty old “Sea Lyrics,” the giddy “Invention for Mime and Tape” (featuring the vocal talents of tenor Brian), the tongue-twisting train antics of “Train” and easy-going naivete of “The Frog and the Crow.”

Biggs wrote a number of “Inventions” for soloists and tape, from which Sunday’s concert included the piece for Viola and Tape. Violist Raymond Tischer extracted the dark, lustrous tone that makes this instrument one of the unjustly maligned dark horses of the instrumental ranks.

Unfortunately, obsolescence hits hard in the electronic music world, and what was once cutting-edge yellows quickly with age. It’s an inherent irony within the constantly evolving state-of-the-art within electronic music.

That problem dogs Biggs’ other pieces entailing the use of electronics, as in the otherwise poignant “Soliloquy from Planet Earth,” sung by soprano Eileen O’Hern. The murky analog timbres (as opposed to the digitally generated sounds in today’s computer music scene) sound prematurely antiquated.

There was no such problem with “Three Songs from Catullus,” based on poems written before Christ. Of particular emotive strength was Brian’s reading of a graveside lament. Rueful long notes floated over a bed of chattering arpeggios sung by Biggs and alto Lou Robbins.

At concert’s end, the crowd joined in a rousing chorus of “Happy Birthday.” This was no ragtag, ad hoc ensemble. Voices boomed and instinctively split off into harmony parts. Obviously, there was a vocal presence in the house.

Things are looking up for Biggs, who continues to earn his keep by tuning pianos but who energetically pursues performances and new commissions.

This year, the Vienna Music Masters label (via Albany Music Distributors) issued a “Music from Six Continents” album featuring Biggs’ “Variations on a Theme of Shostakovich.” Soon to come is a recording, on the Crystal label, of Biggs’ “Songs for Laughter, Love and Tears,” featuring tenor Jonathan Mack and members of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

On the home front, on its Nov. 7 program, the Ventura County Symphony will offer a premiere of Biggs’ “Scherzo,” to open a romantic evening of Elgar and Sibelius.

The Shostakovich “Variations,” performed by UCSB-based pianist Betty Oberacker with the Polish Radio and TV Symphony Orchestra of Krakow, is bold and driving, a sweepingly romantic work. In stark contrast, the other three works on the CD spring from the cooler terrain of atonal post-serialist music.

But then, Biggs gladly runs against the grain and can be unabashedly post-Romantic, neo-Renaissance or ardently anti-academic, bless his heart. He proudly embodies an individualist’s artistic philosophy, following no particular agenda but his own.

The fact that Biggs has landed in Ventura, where he has lived since moving from Santa Barbara in late 1988, has been a real boon for local musical color. He’s a friendly neighborhood composer with a reputation that reaches to corners of the globe.