Paul Chihara (Photo by Robert Millard)

In late November, seven members of the New Juilliard Ensemble will travel to Dijon, in Burgundy, to participate in the cunningly punning Why Note Festival, this year subtitled "L'Orient Extrême" (the Far East), with a program of works inspired by a Japanese/American "Meeting of Minds" which (to quote the tagline) "celebrates the lively relationship between Japan and the West in a program of music of bi-directional connections."

Eight living composers have their works represented on the program, which also includes pieces by John Cage. Each work represents a different refraction of the various cross-cultural influences that the program celebrates. Joel Sachs, who talks engagingly and with encyclopedic knowledge about contemporary music, reflects on this variety of relationships to Japanese culture: "The Cage piece is a very powerful outgrowth of his studies of Zen Buddhism, and the concepts of chance… it's a strongly characteristic piece where nothing sounds Japanese but the philosophical idea behind the piece is Japanese."

Some music, such as Hikyoko (1990) by Jackson Hill (an American who has spent extensive periods in Japan), exhibits the recognizable surface of Japanese music—"on a strictly musical level, of the composers I know of in America, his is probably the most strongly influenced by

Jackson Hill (Photo by Terry Wild)

actual Japanese music," says Sachs. Others meanwhile have absorbed the broader aesthetic principles of the Japanese arts—e.g. their placid, non-goal-oriented nature, as in Sapporo (1962) by the Japanese composer Toshi Ichiyanagi, a former Juilliard student. These differences reflect the diverse musical backgrounds of the composers—a combination of Japanese composers who have lived in the West, and American composers who have been strongly influenced by Japanese culture. The program explores in detail this stimulating variety of creative approaches.

N.J.E. performs A Hearing Solution in a New Jersey factory.

Sachs, who originally trained as a pianist, has long been one of the leading champions of contemporary music in New York City, as both a conductor and a pianist. Through the New Juilliard Ensemble, his direction of Juilliard's Focus! festival, and his own professional contemporary music group, Continuum (which he co-directs with pianist Cheryl Seltzer), Sachs was, either alone or jointly, responsible for more than 35 new music events in the city last year alone. "[I try to give] a chance to composers who are not just the ones who are getting a lot of publicity. What I try to do on those programs is to get a lot of variety of styles so that people will at least connect with something on the program, and hopefully walk out feeling 'this piece was something really worth hearing.'" The N.J.E.'s reputation for premiering new works is well known, and in Dijon, Sachs will present the world premiere of Butterflies, a set of seven haiku settings composed especially for the program by American composer Paul Chirara (a preview of the work will be offered at the N.J.E. concert at Juilliard on November 22).

Toshio Hosokawa (Photo by Philippe Gontier)

At the center of the program are the works by Cage, a composer who might well be seen as the originator of American interest in not only Pacific musical cultures but also those of India and Indonesia. Like many of Cage's works, the pieces employ elements of musical chance; the first piece, Aria (1958) for solo soprano, will be overlaid (as suggested by Cage) with the solo parts from Concert for Piano and Orchestra (1957-58), resulting in a succession of entirely independent solo parts being played simultaneously. Cage's interest lay in the randomized interactions of these ostensibly separate pieces—interactions that vary with every performance. "Cage and I were talking about the problems of performing his music and he said, 'People think they don't have to practice my music—they'll play Liszt for two years before performing it in public, but my pieces they think they can just go and do whatever they want with.' The point he was making [was that] a piece like that only works if the performers play with the same kind of polish that they would play anything—the same beauty of sound, the same attention to detail," observes Sachs. "If you hear a Cage performance which isn't played that way, it's really a bore, but it's no different from hearing Beethoven played badly, except with Beethoven you can imagine what it might sound like."

New Juilliard Ensemble Paul Hall, Friday, Nov. 22, 8 p.m. This event is free; no tickets are required.

The challenges Cage's music presents to performers, particularly to chamber musicians trained instinctively to react to their musical surroundings, are manifold, but Sachs seems confident of the musicians' ability to meet these demands: "They are fantastic individual players… Approximately a fifth of all orchestral musicians at Juilliard take part in the N.J.E. every year—that's a lot of people! We have so many people who want to take part and are really the right quality, that very often in a concert almost nobody plays in more than one piece. That means that vast numbers of people are playing, and a lot of them go off and start their ensembles—which is great!"

Ushio Torikai (Photo by Paul Till)

Sachs has conducted the N.J.E. for nearly 10 years now and evidently relishes the opportunities that the ensemble's unique place within the New York arts community allows. Indeed, the N.J.E.'s programs are some of the most challenging and diverse in the city, something which the financial insulation that comes with being an educational ensemble allows. "The money's a big issue… There are very few sinfonietta-size groups in the United States because it is expensive—especially if you do challenging music. So it means [the N.J.E.] is able to do something in New York which isn't being done very much at all."

This happy marriage of educational and artistic purpose means that the ensemble's programming seems destined to remain amongst the boldest and most fascinating in town. "In my experience, where people fall down is that they don't play music because they believe in it; they play it for political reasons," comments Sachs. "[Also] I have found performers of contemporary music who think they can get away with things because people don't know the piece—and that's not a good idea. Fortunately, N.J.E. is voluntary, [so] I hope that what people have told me is correct: that they really enjoy playing together, that it's a chamber orchestra in which there is tremendous spirit of music making and where people are after the right thing, which is to do the best possible job."