Fluctuations Festival Sets Tone for Exploration

The 2000 edition of the fledgling new-music festival known as Resistance Fluctuations stated its case in small, effective, ear-opening ways over three days this week. Less ambitious than its debut two years ago , its hallmark was the inventive use of site and sound, a logical extension of the music’s exploratory nature.

After a first program of local performers and composers at the Zipper Concert Hall on Tuesday, operations shifted to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Wednesday night, the Japanese Pavilion became a makeshift venue, with audience members scattered on different levels, and the hypnotic trickle of a fountain (an uncredited performer) contributing to the sonic texture.

Fittingly, its meditative atmosphere played an integral role. Gifted, risk-loving clarinetist David Smeyers performed Helmut Lachenmann’s “Dal niente,” a series of clipped gestures and phrases punctuated by meaningful silences and enhanced in this space. Daniel Rothman, the festival’s founder-director, offered the U.S. premiere of his “Yes, Philip, Androids Dream Electric Sheep,” for “teleclarinet,” with Smeyers’ lustrous, slow-moving parade of sounds processed live by laptop-manipulating Mark Trayle.

Trayle returned Thursday evening as composer and designer of his new piece “True North,” unveiled in the museum’s plaza, to the bemusement and perplexity of unsuspecting art seekers. Four circumambulating musicians are instructed by microcomputers on their instruments as to which pitches and timbres to play, and where to play them. As much as it’s music-about-music, the piece also arouses our awareness of spatial dimensions, sculpted through tones.

This year’s festival involved a German-Angeleno accord, with the strikingly fine German-based Quartett AVANCE and German composers mixing in with Southland music-makers. In the final concert on Thursday (in the sit-down setting of LACMA’s Bing Theater), the quartet demonstrated its virtuosic elan, particularly on the turf of Lachenmann’s “Allegro Sustenuto,” a fascinating work in which abstraction is happily married to remarkable ensemble cohesion, taut articulation and obsessive detail orientation. Also on the program were Adriana Holszky’s tailor-made “AVANCE: implosions mecanique” and the Minimalist confection of Michael Nyman’s “A Neat Slice of Sarabande,” a palette cleanser amid the program’s headier stuff. Ending on a high note, visiting composer Mathias Spahlinger’s riveting “gegen unendlich” (toward infinity) shifted from sonic action-painting mode to a propulsive gush of mechanized eighth notes, swerving just this side of liberating chaos.

The festival nuzzled right up against this weekend’s Ojai MusicFestival, a splashier, high-profile event with its own contemporary music legacy. Resistance Fluctuations, right down to the cryptic, open-to-interpretation name, poses a humbler and perhaps more curious view of music on the fringes, whetting appetites for more.