CalArts Explorations Fest Maximizes Minimalists

Despite frequent efforts of adherents to discredit its validity, the term Minimalism is nothing to be ashamed of. It refers, after all, to a fundamental goal of great art--to create an impact at once direct and deep.

That dual quality came to mind on more than one occasion Thursday at the Zipper Auditorium, where the CalArts Musical Explorations festival, dedicated to Minimalism, kicked off, and beautifully. This being a survey of Minimalism’s roots and offshoots, the programming steers away from the bestsellers of the movement (including works by John Adams, whose “Naive and Sentimental Music” is getting its premiere performances this weekend at the Music Center a block away).

The program began, fittingly, with the 1950 String Quartet in 4 Parts by John Cage, a composer with strong Los Angeles connections and a seminal inspiration for Minimalists-to-be. It’s a thing of dry, fragile beauty. Vibrato-less string tones and a slightly detuned cello lay out soothing passages redolent of early music, but with little jolts of dissonance.

We also heard jazz-cum-new-music legend Anthony Braxton’s beguiling, odd string quartet (with one of those knotty Braxtonian titles that, like Prince’s insignia, defy newspapers and typesetters). A series of woozy glissandos and collective gestures offer either a negation of old traditions or a celebration of new possibilities, or both.

Neo-Minimalist Michael Jon Fink placed simple, repeating phrases--mostly for clarinetist William Powell--around which string players revolve, in “Thread of Summer-Epitaph.” “Guitar Music--The Bottom of the Iceberg,” written by Sergio Cervetti and performed gamely by guitarist Stuart Fox, involves gradual shifts of tonal palette, in a seeming effort to transform the classical guitar, with its notoriously fast decay, into a drone tool.

Then there was Jack Briece’s “Time Slices,” a study in sonorities and ascension that sounds dull and mannered on paper but strangely wondrous on the ear, like music for a brass ensemble from another planet.

The world premiere of Michael Byron’s “Music of Nights Without Moon or Pearl” proved eventful, and event-free, in the best way. An atmospheric score for eight players, loosely tethered to a pulse, it’s a gently disjointed assembly of parts, ever on the verge of falling apart and coming together. And that verge, an entrancing and minimal place to be, is the point.