San Francisco New Music Fest Hits Right Notes

New music, in the old-fashioned definition, is a web-like entity embracing a broad range of idioms. Contemporary classical, adventurous jazz, experimental noise and musics from around the world have a happy home in the new music realm, where they can interact and enjoy mutual influence, or so goes the idealistic premise. That attitude makes new music ripe for the festival model, in which many threads can be woven together in a concentrated time frame.

The ‘80s saw the ambitious New Music America, which road-tripped across the country for a decade, spreading the gospel. These days, though, new music festivals in the U.S. are in short supply, which makes San Francisco’s Other Minds Festival, at the ripe old age of 6, an event worth trumpeting, and copying (in Los Angeles, for instance?). Its founder and director is composer Charles Amirkhanian, who is in Italy on a Rockefeller Foundation grant. Enter Carl Stone, this year’s interim artistic director. He has been Bay Area-based for several years, but Stone is remembered in the Southland as a composer-performer and also as an ardent new music champion, who directed New Music America’s stop in Los Angeles in 1985.

Stone pulled together a fine and, within the modest bounds of a three-concert program, far-reaching event last weekend in San Francisco, from the Theater Artaud, in a gentrifying industrial area of the city, to the electronica-oriented venue called Justice League, on Divisadero Street.

A Range of Inventive Works

Somewhat surprisingly, this was a new music festival with only two world and one U.S. premieres. Annie Gosfield’s “Flying Sparks and Heavy Machinery,” inspired by sounds and rhythms from the industrial and factory worlds, pits a string quartet, the Onyx, and a percussion quartet, the Cal State Sacramento-based Reddrum, in a blithe collision of tones and outbursts. From tender buzzing sounds to bracing clangor, it’s all about life in the Machine Age, but, refreshingly, using acoustic instruments. The Onyx Quartet also gave the first U.S. performance of Jacob ter Veldhuis’ String Quartet No. 3 (“There must be some way out of here”), an accessible but artful work.

Korean American composer Hyo-shin Na’s natural East-West synthesis “Blue Yellow River” zooms in on the delicate allure of timbre in a different way. Ji Young Yi, a master of the Korean zither-like kayageum, produced tones and lines reflecting off subtle sounds, drones and pizzicato plinks from Joan Jeanrenaud’s cello and Richard Worn’s double bass. The work elicits an airy quality of stillness with inventive structural signposts along the way.

Pianist Aki Takahashi is a rare gift to the field of contemporary music interpretation. Her work here leaned toward the coolly elegiac, including Peter Garland’s “Bright Angel-Hermetic Bird,” a moving, minimalist-like memorial to her late husband. She also performed six of David Lang’s eight “Memory Pieces,” intriguing short works with varying and specific technical and emotive strategies, brought bracingly, and unsentimentally, to life by the pianist.

From the non-notated end of the spectrum came Hamza el Din, the Nubian oud player and troubadour now based in San Francisco, exhibiting organic grace in his brief solo performance. Leroy Jenkins, from the avant jazz scene, offered a fascinating and raw solo improvisation embodying a private violinistic world, defying refinement and polish and suggesting a folk tradition as yet unnamed.

Wolff Band Explores How We Listen to Music

Improvisation also played a prominent role in the work “Burdocks,” from veteran composer Christian Wolff. The Wolff Band, a sort of all-star new music outfit made up of guitarist Fred Frith, sampler Bob Ostertag, cellist Joan Jeanrenaud, koto player Miya Masaoka, hornist Gordon Mumma, percussionist William Winant and Wolff on piano and melodica, produced a smattering of spare gestures on a sonic canvas. Structure appeared in deceptive ways, and the sound actions, though seemingly indeterminate, were cued between musicians and occasionally tethered to melodies that bubbled in and out of consciousness. At issue is the very way we listen to music and seek out its path.

It was another world, and volume level, when the festival moved to the Justice League on Saturday night. A plunge into the vibrant zone where “art” and hip-hop meet, this was the night of the “a.k.a.” crowd, between New York’s Paul Miller a.k.a. DJ Spooky and London’s Robin Rimbaud a.k.a. Scanner. They teamed up to create an experiential wash--a two-hour wall of sound built from samples, manipulated digital sounds and turntable gymnastics, while a dizzy swirl of visuals gushed by on screens above them. Their work is an ideal bedfellow for the embracing, style-mashing spirit of new music at its most interesting.

On Sunday, Other Minds helped present the fifth annual new music marathon called Opus 415, produced by the Common Sense Composers’ Collective. For 10 solid hours, a wildly varied and generally impressive parade of music unfolded at Theater Artaud. Most of the music was Bay Area-based, with highlighted works by guest composers from New York, David del Tredici and Lang, a co-founder of the event’s clear antecedent, the Bang on a Can marathon.

In culture and beyond, what goes around apparently comes around, a point that this admirable little festival underscored.