Going back about six decades now, there were Alan Watts in Marin and the American Academy of Asian Studies in San Francisco, the pioneering Esalen Institute in Big Sur, Lou Harrison’s gamelan works from San José and Santa Cruz, Berkeley’s Center for World Music, and countless others.
Northern California has long been a vital crossroad of East–West intellectual, spiritual, and artistic exploration and conflation.
The next journey to this crossroad is Stanford University’s sixth annual “Visions of Asian Music,” held on the Palo Alto campus, Feb. 5-21.
Gamelan Sekar Jaya
Festival founder and Artistic Director Jindong Cai has put together a remarkable East–West roster for the festival, including:
Do You See My Heart? — a concert by Mohsen Namjoo, a classical singer and contemporary composer from Iran; his works encompass Hafez, Rumi, Saadi, blues, and rock; he has been called “Iran’s Bob Dylan” (Feb. 5).
St. Lawrence String Quartet and Stanford Philharmonia Orchestra, joining in the West Coast premiere of Japanese-American composer Takuma Itoh’s Concerto for String Quartet and Orchestra. The program also includes Hawaii-based Canadian composer Neil McKay’s koto concerto called Voice of the Phoenix and Menlo Park native Henry Cowell’s 1957 Ongaku (Feb. 12)
Gamelan Sekar Jaya, giving the premiere of Sekala-Niskala: Seen and Unseen, a Balinese dance suite. Ethnomusicologist and UC Santa Cruz Music Department Chair Fredric Lieberman calls the East Bay ensemble “serious students of the music of Bali, who have graduated from an amateur group, playing this dynamic music for its sheer excitement, to a semiprofessional performing ensemble” (Feb. 13).
Beibei WangHusband-and-wife composers Zhou Long and Chen Yi present his Song of Eight Unruly Tipsy Poets From Tang and her Rhyme of Fire. Cai conducts the Stanford Symphony in Tan Dun’s Concerto for Paper and Orchestra, and in the premiere of Korean composer Dohi Moon’s Fragile Waves, for laptop computers and orchestra. Chinese percussionist Beibei Wang is soloist; she has been a featured performer in several Tan Dun works, including the opera Tea and Paper Concerto (Feb. 20).
The festival will also present “elegant gatherings,” with Cai curating evenings of exploration, live performances, and discussion. In collaboration with the Cantor Arts Center and its exhibition Tracing the Past, these festival events will examine music and its relationship to painting, calligraphy, poetry, faith, and healing in Chinese tradition.
UC Santa Cruz’ Lieberman is also calling attention to his school’s hosting of the Pacific Rim Music Festival, April 21-25. Hi Kyung Kim is artistic director of the festival, which will showcase new music by composers from East Asia.
Participants include the farflung groups Contemporary Music Ensemble Korea, New York New Music Ensemble, and Lydian String Quartet, as well as the Bay Area’s own Del Sol String Quartet, Ensemble Parallèle, and Gamelan Sekar Jaya. The festival will also present the U.S. premiere of Frank Scheffer’s film Varèse: The One All Alone, a documentary about French-American composer Edgard Varèse (1883-1965).
