Most people these days don't think of Carlos Chavez as a radical composer, yet it was the visionary Cage who asked Chavez to write a piece for Cage's percussion ensemble. The result, the Toccata for percussion, is one of Chavez's best-known works (along with the Sinfonia India).

Although it sounded old-fashioned next to works by Kagel, Anthony Davis, and Ignacio Baca-Lobera, the Toccata also took on the unmistakable aura of a masterpiece.

Like much of Chavez's music, it is lean and clear, but never simple-minded. Each of the three movements explores a particular timbre. In the first, it is drums: snares, toms, bass drum, and timpani, held together with drum rolls. In the second movement, metal sounds predominate: cymbal rolls (a parallel to the drum rolls of the first movement?), glockenspiel, gongs, tubular bells. The last movement returns to skins, adding the glockenspiel, as well as Latin American percussion such as claves and maracas.

It's ironic that even though the Toccata is one of Chavez's best-known works, he still has the reputation of being a stuffy conservative composer. Thanks to our proximity to Mexico, we hear a lot more of his music than most Americans, yet it tends to be the same handful of pieces. His other works deserve performances, and here's hoping that the San Diego classical music community rediscovers this essential 20th-century North American composer.

Steven Schick performed the snare drum and marimba parts in Toccata. It was unconducted, as was every work on the program. Perhaps a conductor could have kept the ensemble together more. One of the advantage of a university ensemble like red fish blue fish is that they can spend more rehearsal hours than would be practical with paid musicians, but one of the disadvantages is the turnover of players. This year's incarnation of red fish blue fish is less tight than previous formations.

The other highlight of the concert came with Anthony Davis's RHYTHM MAX, scored for 2 vibraphones, 2 marimbas, xylophone, glockenspiel, drum set, and congas. The work consisted of a series of appealing musical loops, which added and subtracted notes to create intriguing (and no doubt treacherous to perform) musical cross patterns. If you weren't familiar with Davis's concert music, you may have heard the influence of sub-Saharan drumming and xylophone music, Steve Reich, and gamelan music; in other words, it was a typical Davis work. Many virtuosic passages for the mallet instruments sounded improvised, but according to Davis, the only improvising was a long drum solo (solo in the sense of the drummer took the foreground, not in the sense of everyone dropping out) and "two bars in the vibraphone." I believe this performance was a local premiere, so I have no way of knowing if there were mistakes or not, but it sure sounded as if the players tore up their parts, slam-dunking this complicated work.

Less successful was Fase II by Ignacio Baca-Lobera, a UCSD alumnus. When Baca-Lobera was a student there, his works often mirrored the high modernist idiom of his teacher, Brian Ferneyhough. If Fase II is any indication of what Baca-Lobera is up to these days, he has mellowed out and developed a more listener-friendly language than the musical labyrinths that Ferneyhough constructs. Fase II is
scored for four percussionists, playing more or less the same instruments: bass drums, toms, wood blocks, and clanging metal instruments (I couldn't see what they were, but they looked and sounded like sections of metal pipe).

The four players were dispersed at the left and right sides of the audience, with some separation between the two players on each side. There may have been some spatial aspects to the work that weren't audible to me, as I was sitting in front of all 4
percussionists; but the separation did help clarify the individual parts.

The work began in a sharp rhythmic unison, and frequently continued with all four players together. The initial rhythm was fairly clear, unlike the kind of formidably complex rhythms some of Ferneyhough's students indulge in. But at times, each player would go their own rhythmic way, creating a gradually denser thicket of sound. Some of these sections were reminiscent of Xenakis in their approximation of complex natural sounds like rainfall or a field of crickets chirping; at times, these sections went on a little too long for my taste. While there were attractive
moments--superballs exciting drum heads into a chorus of moans, or furious tremolos on the pipes which crescendoed at different rates, producing a surround-sound effect--as a whole the work didn't quite congeal.

Baca-Lobera wrote in a program note that the rhythmic relations between the four players are more important than the color of the ensemble, but what caught the listener's ear most were the progressions from one type of timbre to the next: wood, skins, metal, rubbed skins, etc. In this case, the overall shape of the work, revealed by these timbral changes, was a lot easier to perceive than the rhythmic development.

The first half of the concert was devoted to Dressur, a half-hour piece for three percussionists by Mauricio Kagel. UCSD is about the only place in San Diego where you might catch a performance of Kagel's music, especially the works involving theatrical elements. Out of a generation of Europeans such as Boulez, Nono, Stockhausen, and Xenakis, composers who explored systematizing composition to create new musical edifices, Kagel is the odd man out. Rather than building strange new structures, Kagel tears them down, or else he constructs doomed forms out of faint or corrupt materials. Unlike his overly rational contemporaries, Kagel thrived (and still does) on the irrational.

Kagel's music is always about something other than the actual notes you hear. Dressur, composed in 1977, is an example of what Kagel calls "instrumental theater." In such works, the spectacle of the performance, usually incorporating purely dramatic gestures, is just as important, if not more so, than the music itself. Exactly what transpired on stage in Dressur is open to debate.

Most of the instruments and sound-producing devices (it's difficult to think of nuts in
a mortar and pestle as an instrument) were made of wood or other plant materials such as coconut shells or dried gourds (the mortar and pestle were wooden). So on one level Dressur is a catalog of ways to produce sounds from materials derived from plants: marimba, ratchets, rattles, wood blocks, castanets, bamboo wind chimes, anklung, bull roarer, and so on. On top of this is a cryptic plot acted out by the musicians.

Could Dressur be viewed as a marimba performer attempting to play a recital, but interrupted by the other two musicians? It begins with a marimba solo in a steady stream of eighth notes at a moderate tempo--such a direct rhythm already sets Kagel apart from the European contemporaries noted above. The marimba is center stage, and during this solo (performed by Ross Karre), the musicians to either side of him play what can only be heard as interruptions having nothing to do with Karre's solo. Justin Dehart, stage left, violently and repeatedly slammed a chair on the floor, while Fabio Oliveira, stage right, smacked coconut shells against a table, neither one having anything to do with the marimba's solo.

As if that weren't annoying enough to Karre, Dehart picked up his chair, walked over to the marimba, and threatened to strike Karre with it; Oliveira upstaged Karre (well, technically he was downstage, but you know what I mean) by removing his shirt and pounding his chest and stomach with the coconut shells. This self-punishment was even more attention-getting due to Oliveira's corpulence; just the sight of Oliveira removing his shirt was enough to cause audience members to giggle.
The finale of Dressur consists of a virtuosic flurry of notes played by Karre on the
marimba, capped by a final chord, at which point Karre throws his mallets down and storms off the stage as if in disgust.

However, the interrupted marimba scenario doesn't explain why Karre participates in the non-marimba antics with the other two musicians, a series of inexplicable actions such as one of them crossing the stage, bent over, clutching wind chimes to his chest; another crossing the stage from one kneeling position to the next, his outstretched hands brandishing anklungs as if in participating in some obscure ceremony. The height of this absurdity consisted of Oliveira donning sabots, not only on his feet but also on his hands, and performing a flamenco routine on a wooden platform (and in case you missed the flamenco reference, all three shouted "Olé!" at the end of his dance).

For me, the biggest problem with all this is in its half-assed theatricality, and it's an issue with all of Kagel's theatrical works. Most musicians are not good actors (maybe that says something about the musicianship of most pop singers who effortlessly make the transition from singing to film). None of these three gentlemen had a convincing stage presence. I couldn't help but wonder what Dressur would be like with three dramatic percussionists, say, Steven Schick, Evelyn Glennie, and Morris Palter; or with three good actors who had rudimentary musical skills. Does Kagel demand more theatricality from his musicians? If so, this performance couldn't be considered good. Or does Kagel anticipate that musicians aren't actors, and the resulting hokiness is an important aspect of the performance? I'd like to believe the former, but Kagel is so po-mo, I wouldn't be surprised if the latter was what he intended.

There's plenty to complain about the state of the arts in America's seventh largest city, but the one field in which San Diego excels is theater. Any San Diegan who goes to the Playhouse, Old Globe, Rep, or any of the smaller theaters on even the least frequent basis experiences good theater. There's no reason to expect theater-savvy audiences to put up with dramatic incompetence in a music production, a ballet production, or even a San Diego Opera show when there's such a wealth of resources here (it never ceases to amaze me how local opera audiences will gush over an SDO set or special effect that would be laughed at if encountered at the Playhouse or the Old Globe).

Dressur did have its merits. There aren't too many pieces of new music that can hold your interest for thirty minutes, let alone any percussion trios. Some of the performance techniques were striking (such as playing gourds floating in water).

I won't soon forget Oliveira smacking his flabby pecs and abdomen with coconut shells, striking himself so hard that he left bright red rings around his nipples. However, I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing.