So, what's he like now? He has cut his hair and slimmed down again, and he is still every inch a radical New York insider. On Sunday at Berkeley's Hertz Hall, in a Cal Performances presentation, he smiled and shouted to the audience, "Hey Berkeley!" like a cheerleader at a Cal game. Dressed in orangish fatigue-style pants, which he characterizes as "fall camouflage," he served as auxiliary stagehand throughout the course of the evening. The house was packed.

However, his musicians were arrayed in standard-issue (yet striking), new-music concert-hall black. There was a traditional program booklet. Yet, for the third time in recent months at new-music events (previously at Grace Cathedral and Del Sol) there were no program notes — is this a trend? And, for the first half of the show, the music was not terribly more radical than anything you would hear at San Francisco Contemporary Music Players or from many other fine Bay Area groups. Thoughts turned to Terry Riley, who finds himself featured in many new-music concerts in traditionally notated formats, in sober, compact time spans.

True to form, Zorn surrounded himself with some the best-of-the-best in new music. There was the radiant flutist Tara Helen O'Connor; the aforementioned Drury; manic percussionist extraordinaire William Winant; the great Cal Arts conductor David Rosenboom; San Francisco Symphony harpist Karen Gottlieb; and the gifted Lynn Morrow, conductor of the Pacific Mozart Ensemble.

The program was billed as one large work, Mysterium, which Zorn noted was the premiere. It consisted of six pieces more or less tied to "pagan" themes. To paraphrase Andy Warhol, "Art is what you can get away with." By now, Zorn, in his hypereclecticism, can get away with just about any juxtaposition that he likes.

In terms of ensemble, Orphee was almost a revisionist spin on the "traditionalist-Pierrot-percussion-ensemble." Here it was given as flute, laptop computer, viola, harp, celesta-harpsichord, and percussion. The work was invigorating, along the lines of related works such as David Graves' Yearnings of a Middle Aged Composer About to Be Drowned, recently heard at Old First Church, in which triggered electronic sounds in real-time are simply part of the mix.

Next up was the decidedly nightmarish Sortilege (far from the childish Dreams of Ravel), featuring two energetic and unlikely bass clarinetists — an awesome duo of Michel Lownstern and Anthony Burr. They blurted and intoned like Tibetan Lamas in a sewer pipe, and then caterwauled extremely high flourishes, all while bobbing up and down choreographically like dachshunds on a dashboard. It was entertaining, and related to works given at Composers Inc. in years past, but with enough differences to make a difference.

Zorn can be categorized as defying categories, and his music can turn on a dime, or not, depending on the context. He can be "high-modern" frenetic along the lines of Pierre Boulez and Elliott Carter, and then break into a minimalist riff that could be in a Mills College rendition with Pauline Oliveros. Certainly, the collage consciousness of Charles Ives (further amplified by the "quick cuts" of Warner-Brothers-cartoon-composer Carl Stalling) and the love of noise from Edgar Varèse have always been with him. But Zorn can also stay in a groove, like a mellow version of his minimalist-pop predecessors, and such was the case in Frammenti del Sappho, from the Pacific Mozart Ensemble.

The sounds were mostly vocalise, lovingly delivered by this unusually named group, who were armed with tuning forks. (I've heard far more new music than Mozart from this group, not that I'm complaining. And not a word in their name suggests a fine a cappella vocal group). Walpurgisnacht diabolically brought to life a consummate string trio of Choi, Richard O'Neill, and Sherry, in some sort of reverse-Satanic-Messiaen evocation in three unacknowledged movements, the last of which whispered and skittered into the darkness.

The second half of the program was even more compelling than the first. Steven Drury's performance of "[a triangular three-dot glyph] (fay ce que vouldras)" — after the old French "Do what you will" — is like a Zorn compendium of license. It’s delicate, intricate, impossibly fast, with improvisational jazz figures and clusters. There are big Claude Debussy Sunken Cathedral open fifths, extreme-range Shostakovichian doublings, prepared-piano, and high-range frenetics à la John Cage. There’s inside-the-piano raspings, strummings, and imposed objects (certain intriguing circular sounds) in the tradition of Henry Cowell and George Crumb. It's a piano masterpiece of impressive coherency (and incoherency) that ended just when it should have, and found its way while avoiding cliché and parody.

The afternoon was capped by a resounding mouthful-of-a-title: Evocation of a Neophyte and How the Secrets of the Black Arts Were Revealed Unto Her by the Demon Baphoment. It was a thoughtfully provided reproduction of Aubrey Beardsley's related artwork "Evocation of a Neophyte and How the Black Art Was Revealed Unto Him by the Fiend Asomuel." The full contingent of Pacific Mozart (heard before only in a fine female sextet lineup), was arrayed in a semicircle behind a wonderful chamber array of contrabassoon and harp. There were also two percussionists, each symmetrically assigned their own double pair of bass drums, as well as tam-tams, chimes, and upended brooms.

Evocation was a tour-de-force as brilliant as its orchestration. Contrabassoon and harp were marvelous together and in consort with Martha Cluver's ethereal, amplified soprano loveliness. There were glorious sustains and murmurs from Pacific Mozart (again Michael Cooke came to mind, in his impressive work Music for Humans with Schola Cantorum). After smashing what might have been the largest gong peels in memory, I thought percussionists Winant and Johnson were going to kill the bass drums. They seemed to offer them up as sacrificial lambs to the mass slaughter, and then they moved to tickle the straw sounds of the witchlike brooms. It was funny and I hated to leave. This was a concert worth savoring.

(Mark Alburger is an award-winning ASCAP composer of concert music published by New Music, editor-publisher of 21st Century Music Journal, oboist, pianist, vocalist, and music critic.)

©2006 Mark Alburger, all rights reserved