Eight Not Always Enough

One of the enticements to visit CalArts this year is the Chamber Music Wednesdays series, offering free performances of new music.

Next week’s program, “Octets and Other Strings,” will focus on stringed instruments, with pieces by noted contemporary composers, including Steve Reich and the late Toru Takemitsu, and composers as mainstream as Aaron Copland and Dmitri Shostakovich.

The concert will also feature music by Shostakovich’s student, Galina Ustvolskia, and a piece by Japanese composer Yuji Takahashi for four violins. One of the violinists will be CalArts music department head David Rosenboom, best known as a composer and pianist.

The series focuses on the interaction of student and faculty musicians on campus. Composer and performer Michael Jon Fink, a faculty member at CalArts, first came to Valencia in the 1970s as a student. His 1975 piece, “White Painting for 14 Strings,” will be performed for only the second time Wednesday.

“I guess the best way to describe it is as a kind of spectral piece,” Fink said. “There are no changes of pitch. There’s a chord, and the piece describes a kind of archform, just through the changes of the bow on the strings. I was trying to get into some things that I was seeing in visual art back then.”

Another piece on Wednesday’s program, called “Untitled, for Six Strings,” which Fink has not heard performed publicly, involves musicians set up in a wing-like formation onstage and playing only two tones--the root and the fifth. In a recasting of the same piece, he will have the musicians slightly detune their instruments.

BE THERE

“Octets and Other Strings” Wednesday at 8 p.m. at CalArts Roy O. Disney Music Hall, 24700 McBean Parkway, Valencia. Free. Call (661) 253-7832.