Pop music has J-Lo. Classical music has JLA: John Luther Adams.

J-Lo has a great behind. JLA has a great mind.

My own mind is still spinning from Tuesday evening's performance of JLA's Strange and Sacred Noise. red fish blue fish, the percussion ensemble at University of California, San Diego, performed this hour-plus-long percussion quartet at Mandeville Auditorium, and during the concert I came to the following conclusions:

1. Strange and Sacred Noise is a masterpiece, not just for percussion music, but for contemporary classical/experimental/avant-garde/whatever-you-want-to-call-it music.

2. Out of the many eligible composers of his generation, John Luther Adams is the greatest proponent of the American experimental tradition, a lineage that includes Ives, Cowell, Varese, Partch, Nancarrow, Cage, and Tenney.

I heard the CD recording of Strange and Sacred Noise, and it just doesn't do the piece justice. The performance is excellent, but it's nigh impossible to differentiate the parts (at least on my mid-fi system), and that's crucial to experiencing the piece, as I discovered on Tuesday evening.
Strange and Sacred Noise, on the surface, is simple and to the point. Anyone, regardless of their musical experience, can appreciate it. You don't need to be able to follow all the convolutions of a twelve-tone row, or know the last 300 years of classical music history to get all the references, or be able to hear and remember complex, dissonant chords. All you need to enjoy it is to leave all your biases behind about what music has to be: e.g., have a melody, have regular rhythm, have harmony. If you can put all these things aside and just let the piece take up an hour-plus of your time on its own terms, you can enjoy it. It is utterly transparent in both intent and delivery, and yet, paradoxically, this very simplicity raises profound philosophical issues about how we perceive music. It is, like nature, something very much larger than ourselves, and the closest experience I can come up with to compare a live performance to is the state of mind you are in watching a sunset by yourself, going for a walk along the shore and hearing the waves, hiking in a forest on your own and sitting down for an hour and just letting the forest be itself all around you, or going out to a remote section of the desert, where there are no traces of people.

And this brings me to the purpose of this post. UCSD grad student Robert Esler (pictured above) has worked his butt off to bring JLA to San Diego. In a project he calls "The Confluence of Art, Music, Science and Environment," there will be performances of both Strange and Sacred Noise and The Mathematics of Resonant Bodies on Sunday, Feb. 26, at 4 pm and noon, respectively, in remote locations of Anza-Borrego National Park, with JLA present. On Monday and Tuesday, there will be daylong workshops and seminars at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography involving JLA.

In order to find out the precise locations of these performances (there's a different location for each piece), you will need to email Robert Esler at resler@ucsd.edu for the specifics, and I suggest you do it today.

If you email me at chertzog [at symbol] ucsd.edu, I can send you the details as well, as late as early Sunday morning. The location details are mysterious because the park administration won't let him advertise due to permit regulations. (Don't worry, you won't be breaking any regulations by attending, so long as you park your vehicale appropriately as described on his website).

This is an easy excursion into the desert, but you will need to take all the usual precautions any venture into the desert requires. For suggestions on how to have a safe desert experience, please visit http://www.desertusa.com/Thingstodo/du_safetytips.html and http://www.desertusa.com/anza_borrego/du-abpmain.html. Of course, you'll need to bring plenty of water, food, sunscreen, appropriate dress, and there won't be any toilets at either location.

Southern California is blessed with an extraordinary and diverse amount of beautiful scenery--you name it, we have it: ocean, lakes, forests, mountains, desert. For my money, Anza-Borrego (the largest desert in SoCal) is at the top of the list. If you've never been there before, this concert is a perfect excuse to visit.

This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, a chance to hear a composition which invokes nature in the setting of nature.

Speaking of nature, my cat just marched into my house proudly carrying a lizard. Gotta go and kick him outside (but give him the praise he craves).