Something to sing about

The subject of this year’s American Composers Festival, the Pacific Symphony’s annual poking into the corners of American music, is William Bolcom. As stylistically diverse a musician and composer as they come, Bolcom will be featured as composer, pianist, accompanist, teacher and raconteur in a variety of musical settings and venues, ranging from supper club to concert hall.

Despite Bolcom’s having written seven symphonies, five concertos, two operas, scads of songs, solo pieces, chamber pieces, choral pieces, music theater works (and even liner notes for albums of African music), the festival hinges on just one major Bolcom score, his epic “Songs of Innocence and Experience,” with which it climaxes next week. Tuesday night’s opening concert at the Irvine Barclay Theatre included the only other Bolcom piece programmed for the festival -- the breezy 10-minute “Spring Concertino” for oboe and orchestra.

The reason for this seeming neglect of the protean musician’s many sides may be that “Songs of Innocence and Experience,” a setting of William Blake poems in a vast range of genres, is so massive and chock-full of issues that its context is all of American music.

The contextualizing began Tuesday, with the issue of vernacular music in the concert hall. The program started with a snappy, pop-inspired 3 1/2-minute new piece by a Bolcom protege, Derek Bermel, and it included the premiere of new orchestrations of four obscure Leonard Bernstein Broadway songs. It also took a look at Paul Whiteman’s famous 1924 concert, in which “Rhapsody in Blue” had its premiere.

All this made sense, because Bolcom, who is an authority on early American jazz and Tin Pan Alley, threw out stylistic barriers in his music long before it was fashionable to do so. When he finished “Innocence and Experience” in 1982, he said he never expected anyone would take seriously the notion that Blake could be fit to both atonal and country and western music in the same work.

There was nearly as much talk on stage Tuesday as music. Joseph Horowitz, the festival’s artistic consultant, has a taste for discussion and he invited the two composers, conductor Carl St.Clair, and pianist Steven Mayer, the evening’s soloist, to take part in pre- and post-concert chats. KUSC-FM (91.5) radio announcer Alan Chapman was also on hand.

In all, it proved an eccentric evening, more entertaining than illuminating. Bermel’s piece, “Tag Rag,” was good fun, full of merry percussion effects and playing around with a short riff that the composer lifted from an Amsterdam street musician. Bolcom’s “Spring Concertino” from 1987 has in it one of his lilting melodies that can seem to make a listener’s troubles go away. Barbara Northcutt was the capable if not colorful oboist.

The four Bernstein songs included two that were left out the final version of “On the Town,” “Big Stuff” from the ballet “Fancy Free” and a college ditty, “Screwed On Wrong.” Arranged in an archaic big-band style by longtime Bernstein orchestrator Sid Ramen and pleasantly sung by Marietta Simpson, they proved very minor examples of Bernstein’s importance in bridging concert and popular music.

The 1924 concert at Aeolian Hall in New York is legendary. Band leader Whiteman had invited Gershwin to write his first concert work for the event, albeit for the Whiteman jazz band. But the concert itself was pure show business. The popular big band, dismissed by many as insipid and sanitized, advertised an “Experiment in Modern Music” that included low comedy (“Yes, We Have No Bananas”), Irving Berlin, Victor Herbert and “Russian Rag” by Ferde Grofe that jazzed up popular Russian themes such as “The Song of the Volga Boatman” and Rachmaninoff’s C-Sharp Minor Prelude. Rachmaninoff was invited to attend; Heifetz, Stokowski and Sousa all made appearances. Stravinsky was said to be there, but he wasn’t; he came to America a year later.

Setting up members of the Pacific Symphony on stage as a big band, with colored lighting and bandstands made of sheets as if for a school pageant, St.Clair led an enthusiastic, amusing performance of the “Russian Rag” and of Herbert’s hokey “Suite of Serenades,” four movements, each in a different cliche-ridden style. Mayer was an agile piano soloist in Zez Confrey’s cute “Nickel in the Slot” and in “Rhapsody in Blue.”

It takes only the first notes to hear Gershwin’s originality. The performance was straight-forward, exciting, excellent, and the audience couldn’t have been happier. But bring on more Bolcom, I say.

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American Composers Festival: William Bolcom

Where: Various venues in Orange County

Ends: Feb. 6

Info: (714) 755-5799