Even more than in her solo piano work, Na allows silence to become an equal partner in the music as string textures stretch across a stillness that occupies the foreground rather than the background. Na also devotes much attention to the physical nature of playing. Her piano piece begins with the pianist's hands close together in the instrument's middle range, almost dodging each other's movements, before expanding outward along the keyboard. In her ensemble writing too, she devotes enormous attention to the ways in which the strings are touched and set in motion.

An awareness of music's physicality also marked Christian Wolff's performance of his own solo piece entitled Melody, performed on Melodica. Wolff often guided the duration of pitches by the maximum length of his breath. His Burdocks, on the other hand, for an unspecified number of performers, left many of the decisions regarding realization to the players: Wolff, Jeanrenaud, kotoist Miya Masaoka, horn and trumpet player Gordon Mumma, percussionist William Winant, guitarist Fred Frith, and Bob Ostertag on sampler.

This excellent group made its way through a score that was partly musical notation and partly textual notation, uniting and diverging as the players gave the attention and awareness needed for a work allowing considerable freedom. Some sections of the score called for the exploration of sound as raw material, employing a dichotomy between harsh attacks and glissandi. Other moments featured simple diatonic melodies traded freely through the ensemble. Each musician was allowed to explore the same path but on his or her own terms, meanwhile facing the challenge of continued communication within the ensemble.

Wolff's music, designed with these sorts of democratic experiments in mind, is oddly ignored in his own country. Although he is known as one of John Cage's leading disciples, Wolff's actual performances are rare. In opening remarks, festival guest Artistic Director Carl Stone announced that this was in all likelihood the West Coast premiere of Burdocks, a work that is 30 years old.

Speaking of artists' advocates, Peter Garland has probably had a higher profile as the editor/publisher of Soundings, an important but now-defunct new music journal, than as a composer. Even so, his own music proved to be a revelation. His Bright Angel--Hermetic Bird, for solo piano, commissioned by Aki Takahashi in memory of her husband, Kuniharu Akiyama, is a beautiful and moving work. Built out of fundamental material such as octave leaps and pentatonic melody, Garland's work is a profound demonstration of the unending potential of musical basics handled creatively.

Tonality, diatonicism, and simple rhythms, this work clearly says, are no more exhausted as musical material than the most basic human emotions are as a basis for drama. Takahashi, a foremost performer of contemporary music, brought to the music all the lyricism and thoughtfulness it could possibly be given.

Like Garland, Veldhuis focuses on tonality and consonance. And like Wolff, his music involves a process of democratization. But it is a democratization of influences, bringing in rock music as a starting point. His String Quartet No. 3 (given its U.S. premiere here) is subtitled "There must be some way out of here." Any rock fan will recognize that line from Bob Dylan's "All Along the Watchtower," a song immortalized by Jimi Hendrix.

Veldhuis chooses not to attempt an evocation of Hendrix's style, but instead draws inspiration from the song's straightforward melody and harmonic language. This approach produces the slow, motet-like opening movement and the varied contrapuntal episodes and digressions of the concluding fast movement.

Moments of beauty and energy abound, but Veldhuis' lengthy work lacks the extraordinary sense of pacing that brought Na's and Garland's pieces to a more exalted level. Still, this composer's voice is original, and I'm eager to hear more from him. San Francisco's superb Onyx Quartet provided an energetic and emotive performance, their presence demonstrating this festival's commitment to the uniting of local and international artists.

One of the strongest impressions left by the concert was its demonstration of the continued validity of musical traditions as a basis for new explorations. Veldhuis, Garland, and Wolff all included diatonic ideas in their works, while Na based her pieces on Korean folk song (Rain Study) and court music (Blue Yellow River). Although Wolff's diatonic moments don't really function as overall guideposts, his philosophy does return scored concert music to an earlier ideal of music as a community activity, albeit one in this case performed superbly by professionals.

(Benjamin Frandzel is a Bay Area musician and writer. In addition to writing concert music, he has collaborated with dance, theater, and visual artists, and has written about music for many publications and musical organizations. He is currently a graduate student in composition at San Francisco State University.)

©2000 Benjamin Frandzel, all rights reserved