Music reviews: Calendar spends a busy weekend attending diverse and notable events. : American Music Festival

What a zoo!

Those aren’t my words. They were everybody’s words.

They were what the regular San Francisco Symphony patrons kept saying to one another, like a gleeful mantra, as they wandered, amazed and bemused, through the lobbies of Davies Symphony Hall during the opening concerts Friday and Saturday nights of Michael Tilson Thomas’ much heralded American Music Festival. The same sentiments seemed to be on the bewildered but blissful faces of the Deadheads.

That’s right, Deadheads, in full tie-dyed, dreadlocked, grunge regalia.

Although Tilson Thomas’ first season as music director here has been garnering nonstop international attention and local mania, he has now sought to top himself. At a time when most other American orchestras are on vacation, on the road, gearing up for artistically thankless summer seasons or simply asleep at the wheel, he has inaugurated an attention-getting three-week American extravaganza.

And he has made sure attention is gotten from the start by inviting the surviving members of the Grateful Dead to participate in John Cage’s most lavish orchestral efforts, “Renga” and “Apartment House 1776” (played, as the composer wanted, simultaneously), completing a program that also housed a large Ives symphony, a thrilling new curtain raiser by John Adams and some arresting early American choral pieces performed by the San Francisco Symphony Chorus.

Of course, the symbolism and the publicity value of including the Dead members in such a concert have been lost on no one. But it was not a preposterous idea.

Cage’s two works, written 20 years ago as part of a national orchestral commissioning program to commemorate the American bicentennial, celebrate egalitarianism. Moreover, some members of the Dead have exhibited a long, if slightly quaint, cognizance of the late composer.

Phil Lesh, the bass player, and Tom Constanten, the keyboardist who played with the Dead briefly in its early years, are still remembered at Mills College, where they studied experimental music in the early ‘60s, for their overenthusiastic performance of Cage’s multi-keyboard “Winter Music” conducted by the Italian composer Luciano Berio. Mickey Hart, the Dead’s percussionist, has a track titled “John Cage Is Dead” on his new CD.

The original intention had been to use Lesh, Hart, guitarist Bob Weir and keyboard player Vince Welnick in “Apartment House 1776,” which is a theatrical work about society. In it Cage had invited four vocal soloists--a Native American, a Jewish cantor, an African American and a Protestant--to sing their traditional musics, while members of the orchestra play music, some of it with notes subtracted, from the Revolutionary period, much of this heard simultaneously.

But the Dead wound up, apparently because of the players’ technical limitations, in “Renga,” where they didn’t really belong.

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A vision of nature, “Renga” requires 78 players to interpret drawings taken from Thoreau’s sketchbooks. So the Dead joined members of the SFS Youth Orchestra in finding musical equivalents of squiggly lines and elegant renderings of leaves and the like. And though spotlighted at the front of the stage, the Dead were not musically featured; their amplifiers properly were turned down so low that the equipment hum could be heard. In theory, and pretty much in practice, no Dead member was to be more important than anyone else of the 78.

The result was curious and unbalanced. Much care had been taken in the performance, the sonic mix was rich, musical and full of detail. But “Renga,” in this instance, was sometimes overbearing, having some of the flavor of avant-garde big-band jazz improvisation. The “Apartment House 1776” was too often swamped, in part because the vocalists were not all compelling. Floyd Red Crow Westerman (who played the Sioux chief in “Dances With Wolves”) was unimaginative, and that caused Hart, both evenings, to attempt to underscore some of Westerman’s drum rhythms, breaking one of the works’ cardinal rules about the independence of intentions.

The Deadheads seemed to take this all in cheerful stride, listening intently both evenings (there were differences in the performances because of chance elements and also possibly improper influencing of results on Tilson Thomas’ part, but Saturday’s was the more lively anyway) exhibiting no disappointment in the fact that they couldn’t actually hear their idols. Seeing them proved enough.

The Deadheads themselves were an enlivening presence throughout both evenings. It was fun having them around. They were polite (some had called ahead to find out if they had to wear socks, according to a symphony member) and the older patrons welcomed them. There was a certain amount of coming and going in the more traditional first half of the concert (the San Francisco Symphony was, for them, the warmup act), and they were lucky to hear what they did.

Ives’ “Holidays” Symphony has long been a Tilson Thomas specialty, but he now conducts it with a depth and emotional fervor that no one else has ever quite plumbed before. Then there was the sheer racket in the Fourth of July movement, music written early in the century, evoking a century past, that could still blow away kids used to punishingly high-decibel music.

Adams’ new seven-minute “Lollapalooza,” which was written last year for Simon Rattle’s 40th birthday and given its American premiere here, had young and old snapping fingers and practically dancing in the aisles. Soon every orchestra in the land will be playing it, and the composer got a reception that nearly matched the one given the Dead.

That ovation may be the real news of this extraordinary festival that continues through June 29 and includes more experiments, a Copland, Broadway and Hollywood. Barriers have clearly been broken, even if they are not exactly the ones intended.