Music Reviews : ‘Electric Monday’ at UCLA Is Eclectic and Effective

For his “Electric Monday” program in Schoenberg Auditorium at UCLA, Roger Bourland assembled a diverse group of pieces mixing live performance with electronics. The effort proved long on whimsy and sonic color, generally more soothing than stretching for both ear and mind.

The centerpiece was the West Coast premiere of Bourland’s own Portable Concerto, for viola and tape. A pair of bumptious moto semi-perpetuo movements surrounding an effectively brooding aria of depth as well as surface sheen, it is a pert and pretty, thoroughly tonal bit of chamber pop.

Evan Wilson of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the UCLA faculty played it with vigorous, crisply accented abandon and generous lyric spirit. Balances favored the synthesized tape and the amplification gave a gritty cast to Wilson’s sound, but the easy joys of the work were readily apparent.

“The Question Mark’s Black Ink” by Bill Alves gave equally agreeable and pertinent work to pianist Vicki Ray and percussionist Erik Forrester, in a structurally and stylistically more diffuse and subtle idiom. It presents a poised ensemble sound, the acoustic instruments shadowed by electronic ghosts, in a sort of post-minimalist version of English change ringing.

The toughest piece on the agenda, in every sense, was William Kraft’s “Soliloquy: Encounters I,” from 1975. Percussionist Kathryn Dayak handled its formidable challenges with concentrated power and point--albeit a pronounced sense of sectional discontinuity--proving particularly effective in the bravura cadenza for muffled vibraphone.

Marilyn Donadt’s “Who Needs a Gazebo?” combined her Nigerian drumming with metrically goosed synthesized ostinatos as an accompaniment for five dancers from Julie McLeod’s Improv, Inc. of Santa Barbara. The dance was a fluid, evocative ritual, playing with dangling tassles of Larry Sloan’s spare set and easily buoyed on Donadt’s pulsating waves of sophisticated neo-primitivism.

Donadt’s “YooHoo Chorus” and “Holy Cow” seemed like cryptic variations on the same theme/joke. Musically both are electronic collages of vocal crys--”yoo-hoo” and “holy cow,” of course--with mime-based movement elaborations from Improv, Inc., playing with hats in the former and dark glasses in the latter.

Larry Lipkis’ “Prophecies” challenged the vocally raw and unblended UCLA ElectriChoir with its neo-modal chant-like mysteries, though conductor Stephanie Henry shaped the singing carefully. David Crane’s explosive little shop of electronic horrors, “Cimetiere,” completed the program.