There are three new fish in the University of California, San Diego’s acclaimed resident percussion “pool,” better known as Red Fish Blue Fish (RFBF). Eager to flash their fins, they are Leah Bowden, Eric Derr and Jennifer Torrence, who performed with the group publicly for the first time Nov. 18 in the Conrad Prebys Concert Hall. Others in the prestigious ensemble are director Steven Schick, Ross Karre, Stephen Solook, Dustin Donahue and Bonnie Whiting Smith. Bowden, Derr and Torrence come from The University of California, Santa Cruz, McGill University in Montreal and Oberlin Conservatory of Music, respectively. RFBF joined pianist Aleck Karis in performance of John Cage’s 1943 “Amores,” which includes, among others, prepared piano, nine tom-toms, seven wood blocks and pod rattle. Also on the program are Cage and Lou Harrison’s “Double Music” and Iannis Xenakis’ 1989 “Okho.” Following the interval vocalist Susan Narucki performed George Crumb’s 45-minute, 2004 song cycle, “The Winds of Destiny,” subtitled “Songs of Strife, Love, Mystery, and Exultation.” Narucki’s collaborators are Karis, Schick and RFBF. The songs are drawn from American Civil War songs, spirituals and folk songs. “The work is part of a larger project of the composer, in which he’s been setting traditional American songs for female voice, percussion quartet and amplified piano,” Narucki said. “For example, ’Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory’ could be very, well, corny. But by asking the singer to sing in a ghostly, remote way and having the percussion and piano evoke the sounds of a battlefield long after the war is over, we get a poignant and moving portrait of the loss of war. “In the spiritual, ‘Twelve Gates into the City,’ the percussion and piano sound like a city full of churches, whose bells ring and overlap, full of joy and energy. In ‘Shenandoah’ the voice sings that beautiful tune softly and slowly, while the percussion and piano surround it with a haze of sound that’s as open and expansive as that big flowing river,” Narucki said. According to Schick, RFBF serves as a laboratory for the exploration of new percussion works. They tour regularly to such places as New York’s Bang on a Can Festival, Paris’ Agora Festival and Mexico City’s Centro des Bellas Arts. Pulitzer Prize-winner Crumb, 81, is one of the most frequently performed living American composers.