San Francisco Classical Voice

Ultimately, the beauty of the Garden of Memory is the building. Its dignity bestows respect on its contents — ashes, visitors, or sounds. At every step in Julia Morgan's serene temple to memory, one could live Frank Zappa's observation, "The most important thing in art is The Frame. For painting: literally; for other arts: figuratively — because, without this humble appliance, you can't know where The Art stops and The Real World begins."

There is no better frame than this intimate neogothic labyrinth. It is perfectly proportioned for finding, or losing, meaning. I think Joe Colley might have agreed. His was perhaps the most visually striking installation: a pile of cardboard boxes waist-high, with a few Walkman-sized cassette players hidden inside producing interferences that filled the room with sonic smog. The aleatory was immaterial; rather, the empty boxes drove Colley's point home: He says his recent work is "really about how to continue in the face of meaninglessness." Armed with Colley's humor, I was able to last a good three hours in the Garden of Memory, even though my spirit was unable to connect with meaning.

Just a few steps away, Krystina Bobrowski and Karen Stackpole had a Chem 101 setup of tubing and glass flasks to rub and blow bubbles in — all amplified and treated electronically — plus a quietly wailing French horn and several gongs. It was one of the most soothing acts, and also interesting to watch, but a little too serious. Each moment was sonorous and choreographed, but I didn't have the hours to devote to its meditation.

Also clever was the tight little Cloister of Cherubs, in which Gregory Kuhn set up a playback of What I Heard About Iraq, a recitation of statements made by the Bush administration. When you moved past the computer, the voice slowed to a pained growl, like a sick tiger, and you had to laugh at the cheap belligerence of politics. Equally funny was the irrepressible Amy X. Neuburg, who seems to have mastered the vaudevillian amusement of ambidextrous synthesizing, while singing her barbed lyrics with manic girlishness.

Not so funny, though, were the power cord malfunctions that plagued Brenda Hutchinson's Sound Offering: She was attempting to modify the various jangling and clinking noises that we passersby lined up to offer into a microphone. Alas, it took a few minutes for everyone to realize that nothing was coming out of the main feedback speaker, enough time to note the T-shirt reading, "I do my own stunts." Sometimes that's not a good idea, especially with computers and microphones and recalcitrant power strips.

On the other hand, the setup was most of the pleasure in watching John Bischoff's Rube Goldberg computer-controlled, acorn-sized bells. They pealed with joyously random precision. I worried that a church mouse might get trapped by one of the tiny contraptions but was pleasantly distracted by the periodic tingling.

I could not say the same for the William Winant Percussion Ensemble's piercing and unpleasant wood blocks and mallets, which at best filled the ample upstairs hallways with the roar of a cicada infestation and at worst were downright harsh on the ear, as if warning the audience to keep a distance. Larnie Fox and the Crank Ensemble, on the other hand, brought their spinning homemade percussion (a film canister, bike wheel, and the like) to a satisfying ebb and flow of sound that surely evoked Willy Wonka's factory. But it kept going and going, with no real structural necessity. I couldn't wait forever for the sounds to resolve and conclude, so after a few minutes I slipped away, but not before noting that Fox's room was inscribed, "The Gift of God Is Eternal Life."

At the far end of the building was the antithesis of Fox and Winant — wine glasses and piles of shards manipulated by Miguel Frasconi. The quiet in this area was a blessing, and the clinking of pieces and moaning of wet glass had an irregularity that teased the ear with possibilities of real compositional shape. The palate was cleared, if nothing else, and ready for a brief melodic interlude nearby, courtesy of Jason Serinus's operatic whistling, to the accompaniment of a boombox. Such frankly musical emotion was almost embarrassing in the context, so I fled onward, drawn by the mellow flow of Walter Kitandu's clarinet.

Finally, inevitably, my feet took me to a final resting place where a concert was actually in progress: Terry Riley and Sarah Cahill were holding court to an overflow audience. Riley's set was indeed everything you could want in jazzy minimalist, pseudo-Indian, pseudo-gypsy New Ageisms. Riley nimbly tossed off intervals on the piano, slowly shaping ecstasies of key changes that his ensemble pleasantly underscored. Cahill played two short and beautiful piano pieces by Leo Ornstein that have some of the color of Scriabin but are positively square by comparison, even though the scores look devilishly difficult, with endlessly odd combinations of notes and rhythms.

I found myself distracted by the intrusion of a videographer who was at Cahill's feet throughout the entire performance, as well as by the fading yellow solstice sunlight wafting in from a little medallion of a window high above her. It reminded me that life outside the frame is occasionally more enticing, more colorful, more contemplative, and more richly rewarding than the art inside the frame, even a frame so nice as this. So I left.