“Primavera,” or “la primavera,” in most Romance languages refers to the spring season, and every spring, UCSB’s College of Creative Studies, the Music Department and several other arts-related divisions of the College of Letters and Science put on the “Primavera Festival” to celebrate the season and to showcase contemporary arts and digital media.

Primavera runs through Saturday at many locations across the UCSB campus. There will be concerts, installations, dramatic productions, art music video screenings, lecture-demonstrations and other special events. To explore this cornucopia of contemporary art, click here to visit the festival’s Web site. Call the Music Department concert line at 893-7001 for a schedule.

This preview focuses on music. “In a living musical culture,” Robert Craft wrote, “the new music must have primacy over the old, if only because the new obliges us continually to revise our relationships with the old. This has become a tiresome argument … but it is nevertheless true even though most new music is bad – as it always has been. It follows that the composer is the center of musical culture and that a new work is of far greater consequence than the most publicized antics of big personality (performers).”

Now, if asked outright, most music lovers would say they prefer a “living musical culture” to a musical museum or a musical cemetery, but when it comes to buying a concert ticket, they usually will ignore or actively avoid events featuring contemporary music in favor of one where the Juilliard Quartet plays Schubert or a big personality conducts a name-brand orchestra in a symphony by Tchaikovsky. For most people, music is about memory, not consciousness expansion.

Yet, there are a few music lovers who believe that music should have a future as well as a past, and who every now and then like to hear something they haven’t heard before. They don’t expect to fall in love with every new piece – no one knows more precisely the truth of Craft’s observation that “most new music is bad – as it always has been.” Nevertheless, their souls have been ignited just often enough to keep their faith alive. If they haven’t already purchased tickets to the festival, they should.

The faculty composers represented in this festival – Clarence Barlow, Joel Feigin, the late Peter Racine Fricker, Jeremy Haladyna, Leslie Hogan and JoAnn Kuchera-Morin – are serious and gifted composers. They are not of the tribe that believes it is an act of virtue to shock or offend listeners. They don’t play that game, and neither do their students. Give them a fair hearing.