From the Mind of a Musical Adventurer

Passive audience members can’t exist at the Muzik3 festival in San Diego. How could they? Seated within a circle of six percussionists hitting metal pipes, planks and foil, the audience is all but forced to participate.

“It’s not something you’re thinking about; it’s something you’re vibrating to,” explains Steven Schick of the program he and his percussion sextet Red Fish Blue Fish will perform at the fifth annual Muzik3 festival opening Friday.

“It’s homemade surround sound,” says Morris Palter, another member of the group.

An evening of bone-rattling rhythm is one of the seven unorthodox aural experiences that will make up this year’s Muzik3, which unfolds during the next three weekends in San Diego. From percussion pieces played on junkyard metal (and composed by Iannis Xenakis) to a cello instructed to sing to itself (in David Lang’s “Little Eye”), each concert will feature the kind of music that draws the adventurous.

It was five years ago when cellist Felix Fan was struck with the motivation to create such a draw. Fan, 27, who grew up in San Diego and now lives in New York and Paris, was presented with a grant from corporate and private donors that he could spend however he pleased. He chose to create a festival, calling it Muzik3 for the types of music--contemporary, pre-contemporary and improvised, in his words--he planned to present.

“At first, it was just an excuse to invite my friends to come to California, hang out and play some music,” Fan says. “It was also a way for me to be able to play the pieces I wanted to play and hear the pieces I wanted to hear.”

For the festival’s site, Fan chose his parents’ living room--no ordinary space. “They have this big room where we can seat maybe 300 people,” Fan says. As supporters of the San Diego music community, Chris and Sue Fan (he’s a biochemist; she’s a piano instructor), were used to opening up their home to players. Every year, when the La Jolla Chamber Music Society holds its SummerFest, the Fan house becomes its rehearsal space and even a musicians’ hotel.

But after two years in the living room and one at the San Diego Art Institute, Muzik3 moved to its current home, Sushi, a former Carnation milk factory turned avant-garde performance space in downtown San Diego. Although Sushi also fits about 300 people--Fan doesn’t want the audience size to get larger--the number of concerts in Muzik3 has increased, at the rate of about one a year, he says.

As Muzik3’s artistic director, Fan chooses who and to a large degree what will be on the program. As might be expected from a performer who plays with chamber groups and sometimes a ska band, his choices come from all over the spectrum.

During the first weekend, Raw Fish, a string quartet made up of Fan, violinists Jennifer Frautschi and Nurit Pacht and violist Peter Bucknell will pair two Dmitri Shostakovich quartets, No. 8 and No. 4, with “Different Trains,” written by Steve Reich in 1988, and “Black Angels,” written by George Crumb in 1970.

The earlier Shostakovich work was written in 1949 but not performed until after Stalin’s death in 1953. Quartet No. 8, his most famous, is dedicated to the memory of victims of fascism and war. Crumb’s piece is an antiwar reaction to Vietnam, and “Different Trains,” inspired by Reich’s railway journeys as a child, features a tape of sampled voices whose looped phrases hint at a larger picture; some of them come from interviews with Holocaust survivors recalling a train ride to a concentration camp.

Fan says the programs’ ties to issues of war and peace are “purely coincidental.” He put the pieces together because that just made sense to him.

What also makes sense to him, this year at least, is to add an element to the Reich piece, a screen dropped in front of the quartet showing video images of trains. The tape, which he made, will create what he hopes will be a silent-film effect.

That’s the kind of programming that has enticed Frautschi, a Southern Californian whose career as a soloist and an ensemble player is taking her all over the world, to become a repeat Muzik3 performer.

“Muzik3 is really a great chance to play music that’s not at other mainstream festivals,” says Frautschi, who at last year’s festival performed a Crumb piece on electric violin. “It’s exciting and a real challenge to play with things which alter the medium and throw in a variable.”

Another repeat Muzik3 performer, Palter of Red Fish Blue Fish, also relishes the festival’s spirit of artistic freedom. For his solo, in a program dedicated to the Greek composer Xenakis, Palter has invited a dancer to perform a visual interpretation alongside him while he plays “Psappha,” a work that calls for the player to choose his or her “instruments” from an assortment of objects, saw blades and the like--”whatever’s inspiring me at the moment,” Palter says.

“I don’t think it’s ever been done before, to have someone dance to the Xenakis. But I think the music makes you want to move. And Felix trusts my judgment,” he says.

Palter is one of the five graduate students at UC San Diego who make up Red Fish Blue Fish along with their professor, Steven Schick. Their performance, the group’s first in Muzik3, solidifies an inevitable tie between the festival and the new music specialists at UCSD’s music department.

Palter says the ensemble, which just completed a recording of Xenakis, is eager to bring an entire concert of his music to a larger audience. “It’s very rhythmical and very athletic, and it’s easy to project that rhythm onto people who may not ‘understand’ contemporary music,” he says, crediting Fan for bringing crowds to new music.

“Felix keeps up a relationship with the San Diego community. I don’t know how he does it, but it’s always full every night,” he says.

Neale Perl, executive director of the La Jolla Chamber Music Society, which is co-presenting Muzik3’s final concert, agrees the young cellist has a “big fan club in San Diego.”

“As a professional cellist myself, I’ve been following Felix’s progress since he was a little boy,” says Perl, who remembers when Fan was more interested in surfing than in practicing.

Fan began with private lessons in San Diego, and then at age 11 drove to USC every weekend to study with cellist-professor Eleonore Schoenfeld. During high school, he flew to Indiana University every few months to learn from Janos Starker, whom Fan calls his “cellist hero.” After high school, he moved to Germany to attend the Hochschule fur Musik Koln.

As a soloist or a chamber musician, Fan has appeared with the Orquesta Radio Television Espanola, in Spain, with the BargeMusic chamber series in New York City, and with the San Diego Symphony. The ska band, Common Sense, based in Southern California, is an ongoing hobby for him; he last played with it in late February at the House of Blues in Anaheim.

Perl also calls him a “rising star of SummerFest,” where he has played in various ensembles since 1992. Recently, Perl invited him to take part in the society’s Discovery Series, which highlights performers on the way up.

“Not that he needed to be discovered, but the kind of music he was performing did,” Perl says.

Because Fan’s Discovery Series concert will coincide with Muzik3, Perl and Fan decided to present one performance, the festival’s finale, under both banners. The collaboration will put Muzik3 into its largest venue yet, Sherwood Auditorium at the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, and it will give the society a chance to present composers it has never presented before.

Fan, along with the New York City-based Talujon Percussion Quartet, will play the Lang piece (Lang is co-founder of the music festival and ensemble Bang on a Can). They will also perform works by Tan Dun, the Oscar-winning composer for “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”; and the enduringly controversial John Cage.

It’s just the kind of mix Fan thrives on, and any pressure to make Muzik3 more conventional, and perhaps more popular, does not exist in his mind. “We don’t really have any fear of what we put on stage. We will throw in somebody like Sam Rivers [who plays mostly improvisational jazz and will perform twice in this year’s festival] on the same program with a Beethoven quartet. And with your typical Beethoven crowd, it’s hit or miss whether they’re going to like Sam Rivers or not, and vice versa. You don’t really know what’s going to happen, and I actually find that kind of exciting,” he says.

Perl says he’s impressed with how Fan has created more opportunity for himself and his colleagues with Muzik3. “Young musicians really need to make their own opportunities and take their careers into their own hands. He’s made a special niche” with Muzik3, he says.

And one that can inspire some exciting performances, Perl believes. “Younger musicians are committed to this repertoire. They’re giving it to you fresh. You don’t know what to expect, and then you’re just bowled over, because these are the artists of the future.”

Fan knows not everyone thrives on unpredictability. But he believes there are rewards to be found among the saw blades, the video installations and the cello instructed to sing to itself. “For somebody who has never been to a contemporary music concert before, it’s a great leap of faith. It takes a certain amount of openness to even get yourself there. But come with an open mind. One out of 10 concerts you go to, there is something you will hear that will really catch your ear. And for those times, it’s really worth going.”

“He’s being very modest,” Perl responds. “The ratio will be much higher than that.”

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MUZIK3, Sushi Performance and Visual Art, 320 11th Ave., San Diego. Dates: Friday- Saturday, March 15-16 and March 22-23. Prices: $5-$15. Phone: (619) 235-8468 or www.muzik3.com. Also: March 24 at Sherwood Audito- rium, Museum of Con- temporary Art, San Diego.

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Rachel Uslan is a freelance writer in Los Angeles.