In Concert With Sounds of the City

It’s a jungle out there, and one of the most exciting ways American composers, classical and pop alike, have distinguished themselves has been to draw energy from the street. There were urban composers before we came along, but somehow the waltz just isn’t the same thing as Motown or Minimalism.

Still, it takes a certain amount of chutzpah to actually bring the sounds of the city into the refuge of the concert hall, and chutzpah is something Michael Tilson Thomas has never lacked. Last week he began his new American Festival by inviting the surviving members of the Grateful Dead into Davies Symphony Hall to participate with the San Francisco Symphony and to help demonstrate just how vast and important is the tradition of the American visionary in this century’s music.

For the second week of the three-week festival, Tilson Thomas kept the electricity level high, ranging from a moment of sheer moonstruck nuttiness to the dreaded sound of car alarms and the rhinestone tackiness of Liberace.

One of the great advantages of urban music, since it connects with life, is that it doesn’t seem to get old as quickly as some of the more abstract stuff does. The precedents offered Thursday night were Gershwin’s Second Rhapsody, which Tilson Thomas conducted from the keyboard, and Bernstein’s Symphonic Dances from “West Side Story.” Both are serious works.

In his seamless integration of the jazz and pop tradition into a concert work, Gershwin was one of the first to remind us that glamour in the ‘30s required a good deal of artifice. Bernstein did just the opposite, making concert music out of the slums of New York in the ‘50s.

Both set the stage for Steve Reich’s latest large work, “City Life,” which had its premiere in France last year and was heard here for the first time on the West Coast. Using sampling keyboards, Reich literally brings in sounds of New York City--street talk, police sirens, subway chimes, door slams and, yes, those car alarms.

On the surface, “City Life” may seem an updated “American in Paris,” with today’s sounds and modern rhythms. But where Gershwin used Parisian sounds as atmosphere, Reich uses New York sounds as the fabric of the score. Car horns are not sound effects as much as something akin to sounds made by brass instruments. The natural rhythms of kids saying, “Check it out,” are transformed into instrumental rhythms and then developed. Sounds are put together in ways that haunt, such as the combination of heartbeats and buoys.

But, if American composers have been unstinting in their incorporation of urban realism into concert music, they have also gone in the equally American opposite direction of evoking the fantasy city, and Tilson Thomas leavened the grit with two delightfully outrageous examples. Both were premieres, although one work dates from 1927.

The two most likely reasons that Henry Cowell’s “Atlantis” has had to wait nearly three-quarters of a century to be heard are that it was mostly unknown and those who did know of it probably didn’t believe what they saw on the photostats at the Library of Congress (the original manuscript is lost). The prologue to a projected ballet, it follows a scenario by Alice Pike Barney, a strange and legendary Hollywood figure and member of the Theosophist society who had once been the lover of Dr. Stanley, the African explorer. In a mere 10 minutes she manages to include a moon-worshiping people in the Cyclopsian period, sea monsters, androgynous sex and biblical-scale floods.

Three singers (Elizabeth Eshleman, Lynne Morro and Raymond Martinez) howl, crackle, gurgle and purr along with the orchestra. A soprano’s supposedly “little cries of pleasure” turn out to be undisguised orgasm. And Tilson Thomas enhanced the looniness of it all with atmospheric lighting and fog.

The fantasy of Michael Daugherty’s “Concrete Jungle,” which was commissioned for the festival and written for the Kronos Quartet and orchestra, is more everyday fantasy, its three movements devoted to Liberace, Jackie O. and Lex Luthor (of “Superman” fame). Daugherty is a master of musical kitsch but he is having trouble keeping it fresh, and much of this suite is adapted from other works. Still, cliches are handled skillfully, the energy is high and the pizazz quotient is off the meter.

Reich and Daugherty are stretches for a traditional orchestra, but the San Francisco Symphony, with considerable urging from an energized Tilson Thomas, handled it with aplomb, if a bit stiff nervousness. In the Bernstein and Gershwin, Tilson Thomas got the orchestra to sound like a million dollars, which he has been doing often enough in this last season that San Franciscans have become more insufferable than ever in their civic boosterism. But the sounds of this city really are remarkable these days.