Composer Lou Harrison and Joel Sachs pose with Juilliard students after a performance of Canticle No. 1 for flute and percussion in March of 1985. Pictured are (left to right) Maya Gunji, Erik Charlston, Tony Ambrogio, Mr. Harrison, Jan Vinci, Mr. Sachs, John Leister, and Scott Wilkinson. Photo taken automatically by Scott Wilkinson

Today's question: Is the sound of the American West any more substantial than slick film music for Hollywood and easy listening for laid-back yuppies and late-night insomniacs?

Obviously, the answer is yes—or this article would be finished by now. But many people still think the western states have functioned as nothing more than a nursery for the lighter side of American culture. This year's Focus! Festival, titled "West of the Rockies," aims to dispel that myth once and for all, saluting the region's amazing variety of composers.

The musical history of the West reaches almost as far back as its cities—and though the number of composers there was still relatively small in the early decades of the 20th century, the list is impressive. It begins with Henry Cowell, whose explorations of the extended use of the piano brought him international fame (and notoriety) in the 1920s, putting the United States in general and California in particular onto the world's musical map. Furthermore, Cowell's New Music Society of California (founded in 1924) became one of the most important professional vehicles for American composers writing in unconventional styles-the soil in which uniquely American music could finally grow.

Slightly younger than Cowell was the brilliant eccentric Harry Partch (not known until much later, however), and the mystical French émigré Dane Rudhyar. In the 1930s a second generation surfaced, some of whom solidified their artistic courage through Cowell's support, which accelerated the West's rise to world attention. The most famous of that group are Lou Harrison and John Cage. While many of Cage's most celebrated explorations materialized after he left the West Coast, his percussion music began in his native California, and the renowned "prepared piano" was an invention of his Seattle years, created in response to a particular local need. Unlike Cage, however, Oregonian Lou Harrison only left the West for a brief period in New York. Otherwise, he has been a mainstay and an inspiration for generations of West-Coast composers, a major link between Asian and Western music. Above all, Harrison, like his friends Cowell and Cage, carries with him a joyous spirit, an exuberance in music making that should be an beacon to all of us. Focus! 2003 pays a belated birthday tribute to Harrison, who turned 85 earlier this year, by including a work of his on each of the six concerts in the festival.

Focus! 2003 West of the Rockies Juilliard Theater Friday, Jan. 24; Monday-Friday, Jan. 27-31, 8 p.m. Free tickets are required; for information, see the Calendar.

What was it about the West Coast? It is impossible to give a definitive answer, but certainly the lack of an inbred musical establishment there made it necessary for composers to find their own voices. Furthermore, the large Asian communities influenced Western composers far sooner than the Easterners. Cowell, Cage, and Harrison were true pioneers in the way they listened to Asian music without being fettered by European traditions.

Cowell, Cage, Harrison, Partch, and Rudhyar formed a small but forceful nucleus, but were not alone for long. Music in the West, like the region itself, was about to experience explosive growth. In 1934 Arnold Schoenberg arrived in Los Angeles, soon joined by other émigrés from Nazi oppression—Stravinsky, Krenek, Juilliard's own Pia Gilbert, and others who settled into both concert music and film music, which had become a gigantic growth industry.

The real explosion of music in the West accompanied the tremendous post-war expansion of the region. Cities like Los Angeles, Portland, San Francisco, Seattle, and Las Vegas, once frontier towns, became gigantic mega-cities with all of the requisite cultural facilities. Small colleges became first-class universities, some with large music departments. Orchestras and chamber ensembles were founded where there had been none. Composers were drawn to the West by two irresistible forces: weather and jobs.

Virko Baley Photo by Ken Howard

Not all of them stayed in California. An interesting example is Las Vegas, whose reputation as a mere gambling paradise is astonishingly off the mark. As is often the case, a single person made the difference. In Las Vegas it was composer-conductor-pianist-teacher Virko Baley. Ukrainians, the Baleys became displaced persons during World War II. They resettled in Los Angeles, where Virko was educated. Eventually he joined the faculty of the University of Nevada. A gifted conductor, he founded the Las Vegas Chamber Players (whose bassoonist for one year was Joseph W. Polisi), which grew into the Nevada Symphony. Most surprisingly, considering the location, Baley's ensembles regularly performed new music, especially from the former Soviet Union.

Another Western musical leader was Michigan-born Robert Erickson, a guru of the avant-garde who died in 1997 after a lifetime of composing and teaching in San Francisco and San Diego. Erickson, one of the earliest Americans to use the 12-tone method, became a pioneer in improvisation, music theater, and electronics, in a style about as far from Schoenberg's world as imaginable.

Since that time the list of composers has exploded, and not just in California. Some of the well known names include San Francisco's John Adams, Alaskan John Luther Adams, new citizens from Latin America such as Carlos Sanchez-Gutierrez and Pablo Ortiz, Washingtonian Janice Giteck, and Oregonian Robert Kyr. Western Canada (primarily Vancouver and Victoria) also should be included, since there are so many cross-border cultural relations. Vancouverite Melissa Hui has been active in the San Francisco area and is now on the faculty of Stanford. Another celebrated Canadian in California is Henry Brant (though he originally came from Montreal).

The opening Focus! concert on January 24 features the New Juilliard Ensemble playing music by Harrison, Dorrance Stalvey, Kyr, Hui, and Baley. Stalvey's Celebration-Sequent I (1973), stylistically almost the diametric opposite of Harrison's music, is related to the modernism of the East Coast at that time. Oregonian Robert Kyr's Chamber Symphony No. 3 (heard here for the first time) reflects his interest in the implications of the gamelan for Western music, a fascination inspired by Lou Harrison. The charm and quirkiness of Canadian-Californian Melissa Hui's Foreign Affairs should make its New York premiere a pleasure. The concert will conclude with Virko Baley's Violin Concerto No. 1, a spectacular tour-de-force drawing upon Ukrainian traditional music (recorded by the N.J.E. a few years ago, with Tom Chiu).

Four concerts will offer chamber and solo works still being determined at press time. Among those to be represented are Alaskan John Luther Adams, Michigan-born Californian Roger Reynolds (whose Process and Passion, for violin, cello, and live electronics, will receive its U.S. premiere), Igor Stravinsky, and Walt Blanton (a trumpet virtuoso and composer from Las Vegas, whose Jackson Street After Dark, for trumpet, trombone, and percussion, was composed for this festival). Other composers not mentioned earlier in this article include Joji Yuasa, Terry Riley, Ernst Krenek, Morton Subotnick, and still more to be selected. As always, a pre-concert forum with some of the composers, on Tuesday evening at 7 p.m., will allow some of the issues to be aired.

Dutch conductor Reinbert de Leeuw returns to lead the Juilliard Symphony for the closing concert on January 31, including a cheerful curtain-raiser by Lou Harrison, A Parade, composed in 1995 for the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Michael Tilson Thomas. The scene then shifts to Arizona in the early '90s, for Grand Spiral—Desert Flowers Bloom, by the award-winning Cambodian-born Chinary Ung (whose work is influenced by his interest in improvisatory music ranging from Cambodian traditional styles to jazz). The first half closes with the exuberant Slonimsky's Earbox by San Franciscan John Adams. After intermission, the mood changes utterly in Schoenberg's A Survivor from Warsaw, a powerful meditation on the Nazi's unspeakable destruction of the Warsaw ghetto (also featuring narrator Daniel Gross and the Juilliard Choral Union). The festival concludes with Harrison's reflective and elegant Elegiac Symphony, a work whose external simplicity communicates a transcendent beauty.

Focus! 2003 should certainly dispel any notions of a unified aesthetic out West. But let's hope it does not encourage too much more migration—we still need composers to warm up our cold eastern winters!

Joel Sachs, director of the New Juilliard Ensemble and the annual Focus! Festival, has been on the faculty since 1970.