The four world premieres of the Utah Arts Festival’s musical commissions confirm the selection jury’s decisions were on the mark, a healthy sign that the composers chosen are standard-bearers of a musical generation willing to experiment and take risks in producing a fresh aesthetic readily embraced by ensembles and audiences.

Certainly, the ensembles assigned the task of performing these premieres – the Utah Arts Festival Symphony Orchestra led by Andrew Rindfleisch and the Salt Lake Jazz Orchestra conducted by Henry Wolking – were eagerly engaged in giving these works a first reading of high merit.

Tiempo Norte, Tiempo Sur (North Time, South Time) – Miguel Chuaqui

Miguel Chauqui’s Tiempo Norte, Tiempo Sur (North Time, South Time), sparked and seasoned with lively jazz and folk rhythms, traversed intercontinental sonic surfaces with a continuously modulating harmonic undersurface that gave the work its tone – sometimes spirited, sometimes pungent, and sometimes yearning and communal. And, the tritones, while initially suggestive of abrasive discord, in fact, became the transformative element showing the spectacular color and tonal gifts of two musical worlds – that of North American jazz and South American folk dance rhythms – becoming perfectly comfortable with each other.

Chuaqui, who heads the composition and electronic studio program in the University of Utah’s music school, has extensive roots on both continents. Born in Berkeley, he received his formative music schooling in Chile.

The work clearly evokes the bilingual influences of his life – conscious of American and Chilean antecedents, thoroughly at ease to incorporate the unique harmonic and rhythmic gestures of jazz with the folk traditions of the southern continent.

The music, at times, has a bouncy feel as the orchestra goes back and forth with tweaks of color in the melodic triad and the mix of regular and compound rhythm meters. But, clearly evident from the start of the 10-minute work is the invitation to a musical conversation with the different instrumental choirs approaching each other with their jazz and folk rhythms. The tritone elements in the middle give the piece a brief poignancy, like a yearning call for musical communion between the two continents.

Chuaqui’s work, I think, suggests a particularly significant contemporary, relevant metaphor – especially for a nation challenged politically, socially, and culturally by an expanding ethnic and linguistic Diaspora. We can achieve a spirit of confluence and collegiality, two musical worlds harmonically and rhythmically at home with each other. One can sense the musical influences and inspirations of Hungarian composer Bela Bartok and French composer Olivier Messiaen.

Despite the engineering difficulties in balancing the sound of a 26-piece orchestra on an outdoor festival stage, near other activities – a case of simultaneous sensory overload – Rindfleisch did an excellent job in keeping the orchestra tight, crisp, and focused. I listened to the live mp3 clip of the work, recorded in a hall with outstanding acoustics, and all of the composition’s underlying textures emerge with pleasing results. The work certainly lends itself well to a full-scale symphonic orchestra with an extensive percussion section.

The orchestra also presented two other contemporary works: The Outskirts of Infinity: Psychedelic Reduction for Orchestra by Steven Ricks of Brigham Young University’s music school, and Sinfonietta for Strings by Jack Gallagher of the College of Wooster in Ohio. Ricks’ work was an intriguing inventive five-minute piece inspired by Jimi Hendrix’s second most well-known song, Voodoo Child. Gallagher’s work comprised three movements: a Malambo dance inspired by the famed Argentinian composer Alberto Ginastera, a pavane with a strong neo-Classical influence, and a Rondo Contradante featuring solo parts in each of the string sections.

The Cool (for Miles Davis) – Courtney Smith
Wishful Thinking – Melanie Shore

To be sure, the premieres of the jazz commissions by Courtney Smith and Melanie Shore are slam-dunk evidence that festival organizers should ensure that the jazz commissions are an integral feature of each year’s offerings. One only needed to see the beaming enjoyment of the Salt Lake Jazz Orchestra and guest vocalist Kelly Eisenhour in presenting these works for the first time.

In both instances – and with compositions of exceptional contrasts – the two young composers, products of the U’s jazz studies program, showed a confident, adventuresome musical sensitivity that belies their ages (both in their 20s). These works were just glimpses of what should be brilliant careers in the jazz music world.

Smith’s work, The Cool (for Miles Davis) is actually the middle movement of a larger work that eventually will have three movements. Inspired by Davis’ migration fifty years ago into modal jazz, Smith takes an “anti-big-band-chart” approach, opening up the freedom of expression with a resulting highly enriched harmonic palette that gives the pianist (in this performance, Smith) and the soloists in the jazz orchestra the flexibility of not having to “walk” from one chord to another and to make the melody as interesting as possible. It is indeed an extraordinary “new blood” statement of today’s most inventive possibilities in modal jazz.

Meanwhile, Shore’s Wishful Thinking took a completely different tack, incorporating the big, brassy, upbeat sounds with just a few tinges of modal passages to shift and color the harmonies in richer layers. There was a clear audience-pleasing infectious aura about this work, and Eisenhour’s vocals along with brass players expertly tackling Shore’s demanding charts made for a memorable premiere of this composition.

Mercury Songbirds – Keeril Makan

Finally, Keeril Makan’s sextet, Mercury Songbirds, was premiered in a chamber concert in the City Library auditorium. He is an incredibly efficient composer, creating memorable, effective musical images of the power of nature and of man, of color and of sound with an instrumentation of six players (alto flute, clarinet, percussion, piano, violin, and cello).

Makan explains the piece arose from a newspaper article concerning songbirds in the Hudson Valley that were dying prematurely because of high concentrations of mercury, another example of the slow, insidious process of environmental contamination. The underlying environmental concerns associated with the article are reflected in how the work’s long, languid lines serve to unfold the narrative sequence of the music even as the dissonant harmonies put the brakes on progression.

The piece is based on an extended pastoral melody played by five instruments while the piano — with the exception of a few bars, most notably near the end — is played in nontraditional ways. For example, the pianist plays on the strings of the instrument either with fingers or a mallet. Acoustic modifications to the piano result in an almost continuous drone indicating that the relatively benign surficial effects of manmade ordinary factors (e.g. power plants) eventually infect everything in nature, almost certainly with significant consequences. Again, like in Chuaqui’s work, there are brief tips to the influences of Messiaen.

This is a highly approachable, lucid piece, elegantly pastoral and conspicuously dark often at the same time. And, members of the Utah Arts Festival Symphony Orchestra – once again under Rindfleisch’s direction – effectively articulated Makan’s well-developed artistic statement about the incipient incursion of technology and its troubling transformative impact upon nature’s increasingly compromised pristine state.

The Mandel Foundation also made possible the chamber music commission, the third for the festival. The orchestral commission was started in 1991 and the jazz commissions were revived this year following a short gap.