California Gold, Musically Speaking

For the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s late summer European tour, Esa-Pekka Salonen has decided to include two works that say a little something about who we are. His own “LA Variations” and John Adams’ “Slonimsky’s Earbox” refer specifically to life in Los Angeles. Salonen’s sunny variations are not only tailor-made showpieces for the players, but they also demonstrate a newly accessible (L.A.?) spirit in his music. Meanwhile, Adams’ splashy orchestral score pays homage to the plucky spirit of Nicholas Slonimsky, the unconventional lexicographer, conductor, composer and longtime Angeleno, who died at age 101 three years ago.

If these works happen to be a bit offbeat, they are, well, from the West Coast. As representatives of our state’s wondrously odd musical landscape, they are likely to prove exotic for the Europeans who hear the tour programs, as maybe they even will to local audiences who can sample them at the Hollywood Bowl during the next two weeks. But these two works are but a glimpse of our music, and it is worth filling in the picture with a selection of recent CDs.

There is no California School of composers. This is a big state, and it has ample room for every possible style. But California has produced one group of composers who if not exactly like-minded (colorful individuals, they are far too eccentric for that) but who do share a decidedly non-Eurocentric bias, who often wade far from the mainstream and who have given the West Coast a radical musical identity.

This radical spirit, according to Stephen Schwartz’s fascinating new history of the state, “From West to East,” summarizes California’s cultural identity. It is neither ideological nor conceptual, he says, but rather experiential. And for the venturesome California composer, musical experience is never a single tradition.

One example is Henry Cowell. The first of California’s great musical originals, he soaked up the cultures around him, from San Francisco’s Chinatown to his relatives’ Ireland, with equal gusto. And he made sure that ever after, California music would be world music.

Cowell’s was not an adaptation of cultures but an organic absorption of them, and that kind of absorption became the distinguishing factor in West Coast music. It meant that traditional form would play a less significant function here than it did for such East Coast eclectics as Ives or Bernstein. Instead, our music would be made to flow and to follow paths as unpredictably circuitous as rivers of melting snow in the mountains.

No one goes with that flow quite so brilliantly as Terry Riley, who was born in the High Sierra and has lived there most of his life. Riley’s music knows no single style--he plays jazz piano, he was a first generation minimalist, he is a devotee of Indian raga and Renaissance polyphony. In his ingratiating suite, “The Heavenly Ladder, Book 7,” written four years ago and just given its first recording by pianist Gloria Cheng-Cochran on Telarc, Riley returns to other early and less-well-known passions, such as ragtime and Spanish music. He also, as he says, tips his hat to Chopin and Schoenberg. Remarkably, he makes it all sound natural, as meters, continents and centuries all shift without conflict.

Riley is a native; John Adams is not. But when Adams moved to the Bay Area nearly 30 years ago after growing up in New Hampshire and graduating from Harvard, West Coast minimalism hit him hard. And it is with two classic examples of Adams’ ‘70s hypnotic minimalist style, “China Gates” and “Phrygian Gates” that Cheng-Cochran fills out her new disc; both are played consummately.

Pure minimalism was for Adams, as it was for Riley, a passing phase. The varied California landscape is not a place for any one thing, and it has more recently inspired Adams to embrace the whole musical past, history’s and his own. In his swinging new clarinet concerto, “Gnarly Buttons,” which has been recorded on Nonesuch, Adams returns to his Yankee roots. He was an accomplished clarinetist in his youth, and he learned the instrument from his father who played swing. Benny Goodman is recalled, and Copland. The first movement dances around a 19th century Protestant hymn. The second is a humorous “mad cow” hoedown; the third, a trope on ‘60s-style teenage pop.

And yet this score, stylishly played on the CD by the British clarinetist Michael Collins, with Adams conducting the London Sinfonietta, is unmistakably West Coast in its methods and meaning. The music feels as if it progresses by whimsy. Melodies twist and turn, harmonies are impressions rather than foundations, syncopated rhythms shake like an earthquake. Hymn tune or teenage anthem, it hardly matters: nothing stops the flow.

There is a spoken voice, Charles Amirkhanian’s, that manages all by itself to evoke West Coast music. It’s a perfect radio voice, combining both a soothing central California timbre and enthusiasm, and for the 20 years it coaxed listeners into opening their ears to the unusual on the Berkeley Pacifica FM station, KPFA, and also its Los Angeles sister station, KPFK, where Amirkhanian’s fine radio documentaries about composers were often broadcast.

But Amirkhanian, who now devotes himself to composition, has also used his speaking voice as a musical tool in a series of “sound text” compositions. In these works, he builds musical fantasies through rhythmic recitation of tongue-twisters and nonsense syllables. And that has further led him into developing strange environmental collages of sampled sounds, with and without recitations, which can be found on a new CD on the Starkland label. One piece, written for the 1984 Olympics, celebrates L.A.: “Gold and Spirit” includes a chorus of 64 Amirkhanians chanting “Go Van Gogh” to the background of a tennis match. Like Adams with his “Earbox,” Amirkhanian, too, has a tribute to Slonimsky, which toys with environmental sounds recorded at Slonimsky’s Westwood apartment.

The highlight, though, is “Walking Tune,” Amirkhanian’s homage to Percy Grainger. Amid the sounds of tramping footsteps, sensuous violin lines intertwine with a Donald Duck voice, both recorded by violinist Elizabeth Baker, now a member of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. In Amirkhanian’s music, even more than in Adams’ or Riley’s, time and space seem particularly fluid.

Los Angeles produces its own unique sense of time and place, and for a period in the ‘80s some composers couldn’t resist makingtheir music as pretty as a sunset or as romantically tinted as an old Technicolor film. And none succumbed more readily than the minimalist Daniel Lentz. One of recent California’s vivid personalities, Lentz could be a crude composer one minute and a gorgeous one the next. One woozy and irreverent piece called for the performer, usually Lentz, to drink quantities of wine throughout.

No longer part of the local scene, Lentz has been teaching in Phoenix since 1991, and his music has turned darker, richer, more serious. A New Albion recording of a recent choral work, “Apologetica,” makes use of 15th century sacred Mayan texts and has a spiritual tone in common with much of the religious minimalism that comes out of Eastern Europe these days. Philip Glass was an early influence, now it’s Gorecki. Still “Apologetica” remains more Hollywood than Prague (where it was premiered). A sampling keyboard adds a certain appealing West Coast touch of glitz, and Lentz has not settled down so much that he has lost his flair for the occasional sensational pop vocal.

New Albion, an elegant, small Bay Area label, has two other new releases in its catalog that speak our language, though neither is strictly speaking Californian. One, “Voyage That Never Ends,” is a 45-minute improvisation from the Italian bassist Stefano Scodanibbio. A bass player with the timbral palate of an orchestra and an imagination to match, Scodanibbio could practically be mistaken for an Italian Terry Riley (they have been collaborators) in his ability to keep the invention unpredictable, multicultural and ever-fluid.

The other New Albion release is Somei Satoh’s sonic mantras, “Mandara Trilogy,” in which the Japanese composer’s chanting is electronically overlapped as many as 250 times. In this case, Satoh’s mantras are reminiscent of the kind of hallucinogenic music that came out of the pioneering Tape Music Center (now the Center for Contemporary at Mills College in Oakland in the ‘60s. And it just so happens that a historic recording of two such sonically brutal but decidedly mind-bending tape pieces by Pauline Oliveros, “Alien Bog” and “Beautiful Soop,” have just been issued on Pogus Productions, a small label out of Brooklyn.

The music of Satoh and Oliveros on these discs is worlds apart in time, place and culture. And yet, the composers share deep sensibilities toward music that we have come to understand as Californian. For in music, as in so much else, California has come to mean an inclusive state of mind as much as a geographical state. And it is nice to think that the Los Angeles Philharmonic will soon be doing its small part in infecting Europe with it through the pieces by Salonen and Adams.