MUSIC / CHRIS PASLES : Youthful Talent Strung Out on String Quartets : About a third of the compositions selected for the first ‘Voces Novae’ festival at Cal State Fullerton are of that genre. The event begins Thursday.

Young composers have become less interested in shaking up the establishment. That’s what Lloyd Rodgers discovered after asking California composers to submit work for the first “Voces Novae” festival at Cal State Fullerton. It begins Thursday and runs through Saturday.

“Quite frankly, I was surprised how conservative the young composers are today,” said Rodgers, a music professor at CSUF, in a recent interview on campus. “We got work that was much more conservative than one would have gotten in 1969.

“There were very few theater pieces, very little involving multimedia, very little politically oriented work. We didn’t get very much vocal music. We didn’t get anything very experimental in technique. We got, strange as it seems, very little solo piano music.

“We got a few pieces that involved extended instrumental techniques, but not very many. We didn’t get as many (small-ensemble) pieces, like one would expect, even in terms of the modernist kinds of stuff--that flute, vibraphone, marimba, piccolo, trumpet, harmonium kind of thing. And we got very little music that involved winds, which is quite amazing.”

OK, so what did they get?

“We got a tremendous number of string quartets,” Rodgers said. “So that’s why we’re playing six or seven of them.

“There’s been a major renaissance in the string quartet in the last 15 years or so, and this is shown by the work submitted. . . . It’s fascinating, isn’t it? I guess it’s possibly the popularity of the Arditti String Quartet and the Kronos Quartet.”

Rodgers, 51, and fellow faculty member Michael Bayer chose 18 pieces from the 73 submitted by 43 composers. (Each composer was allowed to submit two works, though some entered just one.)

Selecting those 18 “wasn’t as simple as saying, ‘OK, we’re going to rank the best pieces and perform them,’ ” Rodgers said. “No. 1, it wasn’t a contest. So there aren’t winners and losers.”

Second, they also were concerned with programming for the public and including “a cross-section of what was out there.”

The string quartets alone cover a number of stylistic bases, Rodgers said. “We’ve got some minimalist string quartets and some modernist string quartets and some sort of grand-tradition string quartets.”

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If they have one thing in common, it is that all the works to be performed show “a certain sureness of purpose, direction, technical competence, how the music speaks through the media that it’s written for, its sense of proportion.

“It’s like (Thomas) Aquinas says, ‘For a thing to be beautiful, you need clarity, integrity and consonance.’ And I think that’s what you look for.”

Four of the 18 composers are CSUF students. The others, a combination of professionals and students, hail from San Francisco and San Diego and points between. Their works will be played by professional musicians, Cal State Fullerton faculty and upper-division students.

“The intention was always to perform the works,” said Rodgers, who has taught at the university since 1972. “We’re also going to be recording all the performances, not only for archival purposes, but so that the composers can have copies of the performances, since not all of them are coming.”

“A lot of the composers,” he added, “sent work that was very utopian from a performance point of view . . . extremely virtuosic music that is not unplayable but is not practical from a budgetary point of view.”

Initially the age limit for entrants was set at 32, but Rodgers soon found that to be impractical.

“We started getting calls from older students,” he said. “It didn’t dawn on me that there were so many students in graduate programs around the state who were in their mid-30s. So we informally changed it. In two years, the next time we do it, we’ll probably bump the age up because there is an enormous quantity of people in school in their 30s now.”

Rodgers definitely wants the festival to be a public event, not a program for “new-music aficionados.”

“New music has such a bad rep, and I think that the general music public is sort of spiritually and psychologically drained, which is unfortunate,” he said.

“This is really public stuff. I want the public to come. The programming is done in such a way that I think is empathetic to the audience and also will place the pieces in good relief. I would encourage the public not to be put off by the fact that it’s called New Music. “

He would also encourage the composers to keep writing, “just the same way I would encourage any artist,” Rodgers said.

“It’s always been difficult functioning as a composer. . . . Composers oftentimes do other things--teach Latin at the Thomasschule and run church services like Bach, or free-lance around like Mozart or (exploit) publishers like Beethoven, or accompany women’s choirs and play in barrooms like Brahms and accompany violinists like he did. I don’t think it’s any worse now than it’s ever been.”

* The “Voces Novae” festival will present three different programs of recent or new work by 18 California composers, Thursday through Saturday at 8 p.m. in the Recital Hall at the Performing Arts Center, Cal State Fullerton, 800 N. State College Blvd., Fullerton. $8 each program. (714) 773-3371.