A chance to hear works that are classical but also new

By Kristen Peterson

Monday, April 6, 2009 | 2 a.m.

Augusta Read Thomas spent nine years as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s composer in residence. She left a tenured position at Northwestern University to be a full-time composer in 2006. She’s been busy writing works commissioned by the London Symphony Orchestra and the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

This week she’s in Las Vegas — teaching.

The finalist for the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in music is one of several composers participating in UNLV’s third annual composers symposium, which brings together emerging and established composers for free concerts, lectures, master classes and private lessons.

The five-day event, called NEON (Nevada Encounters of New) Music Festival, begins Tuesday. Joining Thomas as guest composers are Ricardo Zohn-Muldoon and Tom Flaherty. Eight emerging composers, whose works were selected from about 50 submissions, also are in town for the event.

It’s likely that the public at large won’t be knocking down the doors and filling every seat in the house. New music is a tough sell. Audiences tend to prefer familiarity and commercial appeal in their classical music. But anyone daring to venture out of the historic norm might enjoy the varying sounds and styles presented this week.

You want beautiful, heart pounding melodic works? There will be that. Don’t like melody? There’s music without. There will be highly abstract experimental works and cerebral compositions as well as stark grating sounds, emotional rants and eclectic textures.

You’ll find it all, and without fists in the air.

“In the 20th century, serialists and neoclassicists spent a lot of time writing manifestos against each other to advance their cause,” says Jorge Grossmann, professor of music composition and theory at UNLV. “A good sign of the postmodern era is that all styles and aesthetics coexist.”

He coordinates NEON with Virko Baley, UNLV’s longtime composer in residence. Grossmann is a firm believer that new music is so varied that it can no longer be pigeonholed, a perspective demonstrated at this week’s concerts performed by UNLV’s new music ensemble NEXTET and New York City’s Talea Ensemble.

Baley’s “Dreamtime,” a 75-minute chamber piece, will be performed Tuesday in honor of his 70th birthday. The rest of the week will feature music by several composers.

Although most of the music to be performed this week was written in the past 10 years — and as recently as last year — Talea will perform works by two nonliving composers still influential in new music: Karlheinz Stockhausen and Giacinto Scelsi.

Flaherty, a professor of music at Pomona College, is known for mixing acoustics with electronics. His “Violetation,” presented in Friday’s concert, features the viola and a computer.

Zohn-Muldoon, associate professor of composition at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, N.Y., is a Mexican-born composer whose rhythmically diverse music has an urgent sensibility. His “Paramo,” also to be presented Friday, is a playful and dreamy piece of varied voices scurrying about in a controlled format, occasionally responding to a pounding drum.

Thomas’ “Carillon Sky” will be performed Saturday.

Grossmann says there are about 30 composition majors at UNLV, including eight in the graduate program.