The 25th Focus! festival at the Juilliard School is geared toward answering one overriding question: Is there a “California music,” to quote the festival’s artistic director, Joel Sachs, and “if so, what is it?” In other words, are there characteristics of contemporary music from that state that could be considered Californian?
We have probably been too glib throughout centuries of music history in ascribing national and regional traits to music. Still, the free weeklong festival, “California: A Century of New Music,” poses the intriguing question anyway, and why not? The kickoff program on Friday night, with Mr. Sachs conducting the New Juilliard Ensemble, offered five works by Californians, spanning Henry Cowell’s “Polyphonica” (1930) to John Adams’s “Son of Chamber Symphony” (2007).
As Mr. Sachs suggests in a program note, California was a cultural backwater until the early years of the 20th century. Perhaps because composers there were inventing the scene from scratch, they felt less beholden to tradition, more open to eclecticism and modernism. Living amid Asian immigrant enclaves gave California composers direct exposure to Eastern musical ways. Also, leading figures of European modernism like Schoenberg and Stravinsky who wound up settling in California profoundly altered the musical landscape.
Yet it was still hard to say what, if anything, could be called Californian about the works performed on Friday. It was a great idea to begin with Cowell’s five-minute “Polyphonica,” scored for a 16-piece chamber ensemble. In this work Cowell, a fiercely experimental composer, explores the concept of dissonant counterpoint, in which the standard roles of consonance and dissonance are reversed. Rhythmically “Polyphonica” is fairly tame, just an ambling procession of intertwining contrapuntal lines. But when the lines settle into passages of tranquil consonance, the music seems to be itching for something to happen; and when pileups of astringent dissonance occur, the music somehow conveys a feeling that all is well.
