Paul Dresher's Electro-Acoustic Band

8 p.m. March 27 at Langford Auditorium

For tickets, call 322-2471

Vanderbilt University's Blair School of Music isn't typically known for embracing new directions in concert music. If it were to add a fourth, 20th-century "B" to the canonical trio of Bach, Brahms and Beethoven, that "B" would just as likely stand for Bartók as for Berg. This is not to say that the Blair faculty are dismissive of the often difficult compositions of the 20th century. In fact, the school's faculty boasts several fine working composers, and about once a year it invites world-class composers such as Vladimir Ussachevsky to take part in residencies and perform.

But local fans of contemporary classical and avant-garde music—also referred to as "new music"—are frequently left hungering for the kinds of concertgoing experiences that audiences get treated to regularly in New York, Chicago and San Francisco. Thus the latest booking in Vanderbilt's Great Performances series, the Paul Dresher Ensemble's Electro-Acoustic Band, is cause for considerable excitement among new music fans. The group's performance next Wednesday, March 27, at Langford Auditorium will feature two soloists rarely, if ever, heard on Nashville stages: legendary minimalist composer Terry Riley on piano and native Tennessean and former Kronos Quartet cellist Joan Jeanrenaud.

Based in the Bay Area, the Paul Dresher Ensemble was formed as an experimental musical theater/opera company in 1985 to work with writer Rinde Eckert on a set of works known as the "American Trilogy." Aided by Melissa Weaver's creative set design and the players' inspired virtuosity, the theatrical series was very successful, receiving hundreds of performances in the U.S. and Europe. The ensemble's most recent opera, Ravenshead, has been performed more than 50 times and received the dubious honor of being chosen USA Today's "Best Opera of '98"—which is actually kind of impressive, when you consider that contemporary opera is even more ghettoized than contemporary concert music.

In 1993, Dresher formed his Electro-Acoustic Band, comprised of six musicians possessing the versatility to reference jazz, rock 'n' roll and various styles of indigenous music without sacrificing the rhythmic and harmonic precision required of a chamber musician. Dresher also employs two sound engineers who work live, electronically processing the acoustic sounds activated by the players. For all their formidable talent and vision, the Electro-Acoustic Band are distinguished as much by their ability to apply technology to contemporary scores in a way that is certainly avant-garde, yet involves and invites rather than alienates.

In Nashville, Dresher's Electro-Acoustic Band will perform Terry Riley's whimsically titled "Banana Humberto 2000," an ambitious work conceived for piano, violin and electro-acoustic ensemble, which Riley blithely refers to as "a 65-year-old composer's first attempt to write a piano concerto." His modesty points up his chief strengths as a composer and musician: his process-oriented way of working and his refusal to be satisfied with past successes.

Riley's career is indeed remarkable, not to mention long and varied. In 1963, he developed special feedback looping techniques while collaborating with jazz singer/trumpeter Chet Baker on the music for Kenneth Dewey's avant-garde drama The Gift. The following year, he turned classical music upside down with his landmark recording of In C—often called "the minimalist shot heard 'round the world." Here, Riley exploited the psychedelic potential of modal tonalities by setting them against an ever-shifting, repetitive, interlocking rhythmic structure with an emphasis on unusual harmonies. This new sound—classical music that rocks, man—had a profound and widespread influence on performers as wide-ranging as the Velvet Underground's John Cale (who collaborated with Riley in 1970), The Who's Pete Townshend (who penned an homage, "Baba O'Riley") and later minimalists like Philip Glass. For the last three decades, Riley has been a prolific artist, collaborating closely with the now deceased North Indian master vocalist Pandit Pran Nath, recording dozens of albums, and composing many pieces for others, including the estimable Kronos Quartet.

As cellist in the Kronos Quartet for 20 years, Joan Jeanrenaud interpreted avant-garde music for a relatively populist audience. To this day, Kronos Quartet remain a crucial link between high and low art; they dress like rock stars while balancing a difficult, eclectic repertory as likely to dip into Jimi Hendrix's songbook as into the scores of John Cage, the jazz improvisations of Thelonious Monk and the songs of Nubian oud master Hamza el Din. Jeanrenaud left the quartet in 1999 to pursue other opportunities, including a yearlong artist's residency at San Francisco's Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. One of her most striking recent performances is "Ice Cello," in which a cello made of ice melts and crumbles as it is sawed with special bows strung with sandpaper, barbed wire or rasps.

Jeanrenaud is a sensitive interpreter and an extremely literate performer. In other words, just because she can appreciate the conceptual beauty of listening to ice melting—and fashion that conceit into a musical piece—don't think that she doesn't know how to play in a more traditional manner. It is her expansive instrumental reach that makes her such a good interpreter, and quite probably what enticed Paul Dresher to compose the work "Unequal Distemperament"—to be performed at Langford—with her in mind.

The two originally crossed paths in the early '80s, when the Kronos Quartet had commissioned Dresher for a work. He was so pleased with Jeanrenaud's virtuosic performance and her expressiveness that he made a mental note to work with her again. And the piece he wrote couldn't be better suited to her style. The piece utilizes tuning systems, or "temperaments," that haven't been used in the standard classical repertory since 1750. These earlier tuning systems have much in common with those of Indonesia and North India, as well as the microtonal concert music of composers such as Glenn Branca and the expressive blue notes of jazz—not to mention the work of Terry Riley. The "unequal distemperaments" are the compelling and curious harmonies that result essentially from "stacking" the blue notes and creating thick drones from partial tones.

Paul Dresher's Electro-Acoustic Band should hold an appeal for those into visual art and theater as well as music. The group have a certain performance sense by virtue of their frequent status as theatrical collaborators. And the musical tradition from which they spring owes as much to somewhat clandestine art movements like Fluxus as it does to any musical forebears. Riley himself likens some of his musical processes to sculpture, and indeed there is a tactile physicality to the tape assemblages he creates, sounds that are artfully and expressively hand-cut and spliced. So music fans, theater-goers and art people, take advantage of this rare opportunity to sidle up to something more substantive than bad art and good cheese.