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A NEW MUSIC STATE OF MIND
A NEW MUSIC STATE OF MIND
Nearly 100 organizations up and down the state collaborate in November’s California Festival, an expansive celebration of musical innovation.
/BY SHERRY STERN /
Yet it’s much more.
The festival, fully called California Festival: A Celebration of New Music, is an unprecedented collective of performances from 95 organizations happening Nov. 3-19 (see complete schedule at cafestival.org).
Both wide-ranging and focused, the festival is described as a showcase of “the most compelling and forward-looking voices” of works written in the past five years.
THERE’S A SENSE OF OCCASION WHEN three in-demand musical directors gather in one spot. It happened in Paris earlier this year when the schedules of California’s leading conductors coalesced for the announcement of their brainchild, the California Festival.
The festival, taking place in November, is a collaboration of those maestros and their orchestras: Gustavo Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Esa-Pekka Salonen and the San Francisco Symphony and Rafael Payare and the San Diego Symphony.
“The important thing to remember is that every institution, large or small, is presenting music that they believe in,” Salonen said in Paris. “That’s a big difference between every other festival and this one: that we are open, that we want to showcase all the talent and all the ideas in the state.”
The festival extends beyond simple geography. The three conductors, all born and trained in other countries, agree that it starts with the essence of California.
“It is a big melting pot of many, many cultures. At the same time, everybody could still be who they are, and not one is going to [say] you need to fit in,” said Payare, who, like Dudamel, studied under El Sistema, Venezuela’s acclaimed music program for young people.
Payare and the San Diego Symphony have scheduled four festival programs; they include the world premieres of Juan Colomer’s A Casual Walk to Extinction and Carlos Simon’s Wake Up: A Concerto for Orchestra
“California is a place of innovation naturally. It’s kind of that open [space] to discover new things that I find really interesting,” Dudamel said.
The LA Phil presents six programs as part of the festival. Dudamel conducts performances composed by and curated with Mexican composer Gabriela Ortiz that he said are “about the identity of what is California and how California in a way is connected to Central and South America.”
Before Salonen leads two programs with the San Francisco Symphony that feature four California composers, he will be in Northridge to conduct the Colburn Orchestra in a free concert that includes a contemporary work by Elizabeth Ogonek.
“California allowed me to become the kind of musician I wanted to be because there was no external pressure,” said the Helsinkiborn Salonen. “The people were like, yeah, do whatever feels right.”
That freedom to be innovative is a recurring theme when talking with musical leaders performing and presenting new works under the initiative.
“Music is a product of where we live,” said Carl St.Clair, the Austin-born music director of Pacific Symphony since 1990. “The West is known for its inventiveness. It’s in its creative juices, which do have a particular flair.”
The Pacific Symphony’s festival offering is called “California Dreamin’,” a program that aims to celebrate the state’s legacy of experimentation and free-spirited artistry and features a new composition by Berkeley composer Gabriella Smith.
Grant Gershon, California native and Los Angeles Master Chorale artistic director, said, “There’s a certain sense of artistic freedom in California and the West Coast in general that has influenced music across the United States, and around the world now.”
The festival features 172 works composed in the last five years, including 32 premieres. The L.A. Master Chorale and
Gershon present one of the premieres, In the Arms of the Beloved by jazz pianist Billy Childs, who was born in Los Angeles. What Gershon called the California ethos has permeated all musical genres, he said.
“A lot of it has to do with the polyglot complexity of communities that make up Los Angeles, San Francisco, the urban centers, the West Coast in general,” Gershon said.
“There are so many different histories, so many different stories, so many different experiences that people are bringing with them to California.”
Such layered stories are explored in American Railroad, a roots-music work to be performed by the Silkroad ensemble in eight California cities including San Diego, Aliso Viejo and Northridge.
With American Railroad, Silkroad and artistic director Rhiannon Giddens explore the impact
the African American, Chinese, Indigenous and Irish communities had on the creation of the U.S. Transcontinental Railroad connecting the East Coast to California.
Also making several stops will be the multiyear series “Fragments” from cellist Alisa Weilerstein, who lives part-time in San Diego with her husband, the San Diego Symphony’s Payare.
“Fragments” weaves movements of Bach’s solo cello suites with works by 27 composers commissioned by Weilerstein. She performs “Fragments” at Walt Disney Concert Hall and at the Conrad in La Jolla as part of an international tour.
La Jolla Music Society, which often leans into new music, presents American Railroad and copresents “Fragments” with San Diego Symphony.
“It’s not always been easy to draw audiences to contemporary music,” said Leah Rosenthal, artistic director of La Jolla Music Society. But as the music has changed so has audience acceptance.
“For so long, there was an idea of what new music sounded like,” she said. “It was atonal. Now it’s anything goes, from the most tonal beautiful melodies to still challenging sounds.
“It’s a work in progress and our audiences are ... more open to hearing and experiencing new music.”
Contemporary music might not first come to mind when one thinks of chamber music, the heart of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra.
“We’re nerds in the Baroque classical space and we’re excited to celebrate that nerdiness,” said LACO managing director Ricky Dean McWain. “So are our patrons.”
Yet LACO is so dedicated to championing contemporary composers that it has a club for audience members called South Investment; donors join to underwrite an annual commission by a composer from Los Angeles or with ties to the city.
Its program during the festival is a prime example of how LACO weaves traditional and new music. Traces, a violin concerto by Nina C. Young, makes its world premiere paired with symphonies by C.P.E. Bach and Felix Mendelssohn.
The new work by Young, associate professor of composition at the USC Thornton School of Music, is a LACO co-commission with the Philadelphia Orchestra.
LA Opera, a guardian for another art form that relies on a traditional cannon, infuses contemporary work into all aspects of its programming, said Christopher Koelsch, president and CEO.
This season, that includes El último sueño de Frida y Diego (“The Last Dream of Frida and Diego”), a new opera by Gabriela Lena Frank, a Californian, and Nilo Cruz.
Since its premiere a year ago, Frida y Diego has been, Koelsch said, “a monster hit for both San Diego and for San Francisco.”
An opera about the relationship between artists Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera could have been paint-by-numbers, but Frank and Cruz created something much more interesting, Koelsch said.
“I found the experience both aesthetically and spiritually deeply moving. It’s an unconventional structure and it’s an unconventional opera that people have found to be quite delightful.”
It’s scheduled for six performances at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion that overlap with the California Festival.
“I’m thrilled and delighted at the kismet that the two things lined up so, so perfectly,” Koelsch said.
In his 11 years running LA Opera, Koelsch said he has seen the audience appetite for new music grow exponentially. He gives much credit to Salonen, who made contemporary work essential during his association with the LA Phil.
“Esa-Pekka pretty much single-handedly created this marketplace for audiences for the reception of new music,” Koelsch said. “He was really the person who blew up that old model of how a symphonic program would go.”
As Salonen changed audience expectations at the LA Phil, LA Opera’s contemporary programming benefited.
“I feel like I inherited the mantle of a marketplace that he had created,” Koelsch said.
“Audiences are voting with their feet and with their wallets. They are signaling to us that they are as interested in contemporary artists as they are in the existing canon.”
The 95 organizations taking part in the festival are to one degree or another building back after the post-pandemic slowdowns.
“My hope,” McWain said, “is that a series of events like this with overlapping audiences is a boon for audience development and ... a return home for patrons of the arts.”
