A roving show of Jewish heritage

“New Jewish Music From CalArts” was the title of the kickoff event of the Jewish Music Foundation’s “Beyond Bim-Bam: New Directions in Jewish Music,” a peripatetic festival of concerts and panels culminating in a UCLA Extension symposium on Jewish culture May 4. And well that these festivities should start with a collaboration between the Skirball Cultural Center and CalArts, given the latter’s rich, ongoing history at or near the cutting edge of new music.

Yet there wasn’t much genuinely new music to be heard in the Skirball’s Magnin Auditorium on Tuesday night. Only one piece, the first performance of a solo scene from “The White Hotel,” a forthcoming opera by CalArts faculty member Marc Lowenstein, could actually qualify. If anything, this was mostly a legacy concert, an affectionate flashback to the heyday of the now-legendary CalArts Contemporary Music Festivals of the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Morton Feldman wasn’t thought of as a composer of Jewish music per se, yet “The King of Denmark” (1964) -- now standard repertory for solo percussionists -- and “Rabbi Akiba” (1963) for voice and 10 players do draw their titles from heroes in Jewish history. Feldman’s radically quiet, spare, repetitive bent was already in place in these works, but his ideas are more easily assimilated in these succinct pieces than they would be later on.

Steve Reich’s “Tehillim” (1981) is a buoyant, syncopated landmark -- Reich’s first published setting of a text (four psalms) and his first exploration of his Jewish heritage. Los Angeles first heard this joyous music at a CalArts festival 20 years ago, and, by the festival organizer’s reckoning, this was only its second local performance. Played, as were all the works, by the student/faculty CalArts New Millennium Ensemble, it was a bit wobbly in spots, but it was at the composer’s tempos and with the right appealing lightness of voice and texture.

This left Lowenstein -- who conducted the excerpt from his forthcoming opera -- as the sole representative of the new. In the 22 1/2-minute scene, he decorates his soprano soloist (Ani Maldjian) with luminous scoring that builds to passages of weird psychological tension and dream-like states. Yet this music actually seemed less forward-looking than that of the old masters Feldman and Reich.

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‘Beyond Bim-Bam’

What: ‘Beyond Bim-Bam: New Directions in Jewish Music’

Where: Concerts, workshops and a symposium at various sites in Los Angeles

When: Through May 4

Info: (818) 716-6211; www.Jewishmusicfoundation.org