The Back Cove Festival of Contemporary Music at the Portland Conservatory of Music is celebrating its seventh anniversary this year with a new opening concert by the Portland Chamber Music Festival at Space Gallery on April 9. The festival performances continue through April 12.

One of the pieces to be played at the opening event is the Bellagio Variation for string quartet by Maine composer Elliott Schwartz, who founded the festival in cooperation with the conservatory in 2008.

I still remember Schwartz’ masterful performance of John Cage’s 4’33” – four minutes and 33 seconds of silence – which he proclaimed, with tongue in cheek, a very difficult work.

4’33” is about the impossibility of silence, since it portrays a soundscape of audience noises, aircraft overhead, traffic on Woodford Street, and so on. The length, 273 seconds, refers to the temperature of absolute zero in degrees Celsius (-273), another point that can be approached, but never realized.

I mention Cage’s work, which won’t be played at the festival this year, because Cage was a strong influence on one of the festival’s guest composers, Michael Schelle.

Opening night of the festival at Woodfords Congregational Church in Portland, at 7:30 p.m. April 10, includes a reception at which audience members can meet composers from Maine and the Northeast, plus two featured guest composers, Howard Frazin and Michael Schelle. Frazin and Schelle will lead a student composition workshop at 1 p.m. April 11. (Workshops and lectures are open to the public.)

Schelle is composer in residence at Butler University. Franzin teaches at the New England Conservatory of Music and is currently president of Composers in Red Sneakers, a Cambridge-based composer’s collective.

Saturday night’s performance of “Straight, No Lithium,” a collection of nine preludes for solo piano was composed by Schelle. As described by Allan Koznin of the New York Times, “Schelle begins with a rollicking update of the barrelhouse style, sometimes mating parodies of Sprechstimme, with the energetic pianist, Jim Loughery, gamely vocalizing. A more introspective, angular middle section … leads to an explosion of purely Bachian figuration, punctuated by brash, increasingly assertive chords that seemed oddly natural, rather than disruptive.”

Frazin’s music is generally tonal, characterized by an expressive style that develops and repeats distinctive short motifs. His Sonata for Solo Flute will be performed on April 10, and his Sonata for Cello and Piano on April 12. Some of his notable songs will also be featured but the titles were still to be announced at press time, but his “Songs for the End of Winter” would be welcome.

The April 12 concert also will include a 1980 work by Elliott Schwartz, “Jet Piece,” which incorporates improvisation by the musicians, and Schelle’s “Iron Cello” for cello and piano, plus his “Music for the Last Days of Mouse, Mary Claire, and the New Complexity,” for solo trumpet.

There are too many composers of contemporary music in Maine to name them all here, but most can be heard, and even met, at the festival. In my experience, their work is at a high level and unfailingly interesting, even if you can’t whistle it on the way home (Schoenberg’s goal). A complete program can be viewed at portlandconservatoryofmusic.org.

Tickets for festival concerts are $15, $12 for students and seniors. The PCMF concert on April 9, which in addition to the “Bellagio Variations” will include Ravel’s only string quartet and David Ludwig’s “Pale Blue Dot,” is $15, $13 for members, students and seniors.

Christopher Hyde is a writer and musician who lives in Pownal, He can be reached at:

classbeat@netscape.net

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