In 1936, Isabel Morse Jones, a music critic for the Los Angeles Times, made a modest boast: “We in the west have been permitted freedom to develop our music in our own way to a certain extent, because of the distances between us and the musical politics of the east and Europe.” For sure: by the mid-nineteen-thirties, California composers were already striking new paths. Henry Cowell, a Bay Area native, was exploring cluster chords, drones, and open forms. Lou Harrison, an Oregonian gone south, was absorbing non-Western traditions. John Cage, a graduate of Los Angeles High School, was beginning to theorize a music of percussion and noise. Meanwhile, European composers were fleeing totalitarian Europe and making their way West. In 1934, the modernist titan Arnold Schoenberg took refuge in L.A.; Korngold, Stravinsky, Eisler, and Rachmaninoff followed. The colliding energies of California culture triggered multiple revolutions in the ensuing decades, with the hypnotically looping minimalism of Terry Riley’s “In C” exerting global influence.
Jones was wise to insert the qualifying phrase “to a certain extent,” since there is ultimately no way to assess how a given environment shapes artistic thinking. Nothing that happened in California—percussion music, drone music, electronic soundscapes, psychedelic fusions of classical and rock—happened only in California. Still, many generations of composers have attested to the disinhibiting effect of life on the West Coast. Such has been the experience of Esa-Pekka Salonen, a Finnish ex-modernist who has spent about half of his professional career in California. From 1992 to 2009, Salonen led the Los Angeles Philharmonic; in 2020 he took the helm of the San Francisco Symphony. He recently told me, “In my early days, what I perceived and felt was the freedom—the lack of a school or of competing schools, the nonpolitical nature of the arts. I still feel the same. No one is saying, as they do in Europe, ‘We don’t do that kind of thing,’ or, as they say in pop music, ‘That is so 2015.’ ”
For years, Salonen had been mulling over the idea of a statewide classical-music jamboree. Gustavo Dudamel, Salonen’s successor at the L.A. Phil, and Chad Smith, until recently the orchestra’s chief executive, embraced the concept, as did Rafael Payare and the San Diego Symphony. Thus was born the California Festival, which ran for seventeen hectic days this past November. Nearly a hundred other organizations participated, each of them programming at least one work written in the previous five years. Catching more than a fraction of the festival was geographically impossible: the state is larger in land mass than all but three countries in the European Union. I managed to attend seventeen events, mostly in L.A., and heard more than fifty new, or newish, pieces. Nothing on this scale has been attempted in America in recent memory.
On one weekend, I saw, in quick succession, the state’s three leading orchestras. First up was the San Francisco Symphony, performing at the University of California, Berkeley. Salonen has perfected what might be called the California-cuisine model of classical programming: meat-and-potatoes repertory is deëmphasized in favor of a healthy, often home-grown diet of twentieth-century and contemporary fare. At Berkeley, Salonen conducted his composition “Kínēma,” a sensuous but unsentimental clarinet concerto that shares some material with his score for the Finnish film “The Wait,” from 2021. He then gave the world première of Jens Ibsen’s “Drowned in Light,” a lively, disjointed tribute to orchestral prog rock. Finally came a whip-crack account of Stravinsky’s Symphony in Three Movements, completed in West Hollywood in 1945.
The next day, five hundred miles to the south, Payare and the San Diego Symphony offered Carlos Simon’s “Wake Up: Concerto for Orchestra,” an incisively argued musical narrative with a political undertow. Simon took inspiration from Rajendra Bhandari’s poem “Awake, Asleep,” which warns that “during the pandemic of sleep / the despot sings of peace.” Dulcet intimations of sweet slumber give way to darker, more dissonant harmonies: a thudding two-note signal, evoking the command “Wake up!,” hints at Siegfried’s death motif in Wagner’s “Götterdämmerung.” After intermission, Payare led a full-throated rendition of “The Ring Without Words,” Lorin Maazel’s ingenious telescoping of Wagner’s epic.
At the end of the weekend, I saw the L.A. Phil play at Disney Hall, under Dudamel’s direction. Fittingly, in a city where nearly half of the residents are of Hispanic or Latino descent, Dudamel threw the spotlight on Latino composers, emphasizing themes of social resistance. Both on this program and on one the following week, he featured music by Gabriela Ortiz, who is from Mexico City and specializes in tumultuously vibrant orchestral soundscapes. “Seis Piezas a Violeta” (“Six Pieces for Violeta”), for piano and strings, pays homage to the Chilean singer-songwriter and activist Violeta Parra. “Revolución Diamantina” (“Glitter Revolution”), a forty-minute ballet score, honors recent women’s-rights protests in Mexico City. The ballet makes knowing use of brutal rhythmic devices from “The Rite of Spring,” revoking that work’s implicit celebration of female sacrifice.
Beyond the marquee events at big-budget venues—also in the mix were San Francisco Opera, staging Rhiannon Giddens and Michael Abels’s “Omar,” and L.A. Opera, with Gabriela Lena Frank’s “El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego”—the California Festival shed light on a teeming ecosystem of smaller but often no less ambitious ensembles. I checked in with the Pasadena Symphony, the Burbank Philharmonic, the Pacific Symphony, the U.S.C. Percussion Group, and the reliably vital Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra. If the laws of space-time had allowed, I might also have heard the San Luis Obispo Symphony, the Fresno Philharmonic, and, far to the north, the Symphony of the Redwoods, at Fort Bragg.
California’s myriad new-music organizations qualified for the festival simply by continuing to do what they have always done. My agenda included Wild Up, Piano Spheres, the Hear Now Music Festival, and the L.A. Phil’s Green Umbrella series. The music ran the gamut from the beguilingly tuneful to the violently experimental. This was to be expected in a state that birthed both Riley and Cage, both the Beach Boys and the Germs. There are California traditions, but there is no California sound.
The far-out folks at Wild Up presented a multidisciplinary happening called “We’re Here! What Now?,” incorporating music by Sarah Hennies, interstitial poetry readings by Lynne Thompson, and an all-female whistling brigade organized by the artist Susan Silton. The prospect of listening to people whistle for more than an hour was daunting, but Silton had a persuasive rationale for the project. She inherited a family whistling tradition from her father, Fred, who escaped Nazi-occupied Austria and later came to L.A. In 1999, a tumor on a vocal cord caused Silton to temporarily lose her voice but not her ability to whistle. That’s when she discovered the existence of a bias against female whistling—according to an old saying, “Whistling girls and crowing hens will come to no good in the end”—and formed her ensemble, the Crowing Hens, in response. Hennies, a composer with an uncanny feeling for the gradual unfolding of events over time, subsumed the Hens into a spare, luminous texture combining notated elements with live improvisation.
Piano Spheres and Hear Now both featured the gifted young composer Nina Shekhar, who grew up in Detroit and studied at the University of Southern California. Vicki Ray and Aron Kallay, the mainstays of Piano Spheres, played Shekhar’s “hush,” for microtonal keyboards. At Hear Now’s concert, the Lyris Quartet offered her “rockabye-bye.” Both pieces breathe an atmosphere of nervous trance, blending sweetness and strangeness, simple chords and instrumental noises. The score for “rockabye-bye” begins with an indication for “whispery, unstable calm.” That same phrase could be applied to much of Hennies’s music; these days, more than a few composers, Californian or not, seem inclined to conjure spaces of watchful refuge.
Perhaps the most topographically evocative entry in the festival was M. A. Tiesenga’s “Sketches of Chaparral,” which appeared at Green Umbrella, alongside no less notable works by Dylan Mattingly, Reena Esmail, and Samuel Adams. Tiesenga, a graduate of the perennially productive avant-garde hothouse of CalArts, salutes the most universal of California beings—the low-lying, prickly shrubs that cling to the state’s hills, mountains, arroyos, and deserts. On hiking expeditions, Tiesenga made charcoal rubbings of the plants, fashioned sketches from them, and began to transform the resulting shapes and patterns into a score.
This process harks back to Cage’s methodology in works such as “Ryoanji,” which employs drawings that the composer made at the rock garden of the same name, in Kyoto. Tiesenga, however, makes room for un-Cagean melodic gestures and euphonious harmonies. The performers are encouraged to bring their own sensibilities into play; at times, they react spontaneously to the undulating lines of Tiesenga’s chaparral drawings, samples of which appear in their parts. At one point, Joanne Pearce Martin, the L.A. Phil’s peerless resident pianist, divined a glittering, cadenza-like solo from a skeletal array of notes. “Sketches of Chaparral” is a formidable imaginative act, but it is also an act of mediation between the natural landscape—wounded but still magnificent—and a community of musicians who hope to restore paradise in sound. ♦
