MUSIC / CHRIS PASLES : Percussion Ensemble Beats Drum for Gentle Sound : Concert: Nexus will perform a ‘reflective’ work by Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu at the Center on Thursday and Friday.

Classical-music audiences can hear the beat of a different drummer--five, in fact--when the Nexus Percussion Ensemble rolls in Thursday and Friday to the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa.

Expect to see bells, drums, gongs, steel drums, temple blocks, vibraphone, glockenspiel, even sets of wind chimes tied with lengthy colored ribbons extending out into the hall and over the heads of the audience.

But the sounds will not be thunderous when Nexus plays the West Coast premiere of Toru Takemitsu’s “From me flows what you call Time” with the Pacific Symphony.

“It’s a very gentle, introspective and reflective work, which is really unusual for percussion,” said Nexus member William Cahn, in a recent phone interview from his home in Holcomb, N.Y., near Rochester. Cahn is the only member of the group who lives in the United States. The other four live in Toronto.

To commemorate its 100th anniversary in 1990, Carnegie Hall commissioned Takemitsu’s work for Nexus and the Boston Symphony. In a program note, the composer writes that the title comes from a poem by Makoto Ooka, entitled (in translation) “Clear Blue Water”:

“When I read the words ‘From me flows what you call Time,’ I suddenly imagined 100 years of time flowing through this man-made space, so full of special meaning, called Carnegie Hall. It was as if I could hear the hall murmuring from the numberless cracks between the layers of those years, ‘From me flows what you call Time.’ Thus, the ‘me’ in the title is meant to be ‘Carnegie Hall,’ not the composer.”

The five colored ribbons--derived from traditional Buddhist art--have meanings tied to the four elements and their combination. Blue is water; red, fire; yellow, earth; green, wind; and white, the sky, the heavens and “finally, ‘nothingness,’ ” Takemitsu continued.

Cahn called the 30-minute work “evocative and unlike any piece in the repertory. It also has a theatrical and visual aspect to it. The percussionists enter from the audience in a sort of ritual, like priests.”

The work is “sound-oriented, as opposed to rhythm or loudness or power and the force of percussion. It allows one to meditate on sounds new to a symphony orchestra.”

Nexus gave its first concert in 1971 at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, N.Y.

“We met at Eastman as students, or else when playing in some symphony orchestra,” Cahn said. “Some of the guys I’ve known since high-school days. We’re all close friends.

“We came together naturally as an ensemble,” he added. “But we had a terrible time choosing a name.”

They solved the problem when they picked up a word out of California experimental patriarch-composer Harry Partch’s book, “Genesis of a Music.”

“He used the word ‘nexus’ to describe those things that unified his theory of what music should be,” Cahn said. “It was a word that stuck with us.”

In addition to Cahn, the ensemble includes Bob Becker, Robin Engelman, Russell Hartenberger and John Wyre. Becker also is a member of the Steve Reich and Musicians ensemble. Cahn has been principal percussionist with the Rochester Philharmonic since 1968.

Engelman has been director of the contemporary Music and Percussion ensembles of the University of Toronto since 1982. Hartenberger teaches percussion at the University of Toronto and plays regularly in the Reich ensemble. Wyre is an adjunct member of the Toronto Symphony.

Although all the players do solo work, “we find the greatest musical enjoyment comes from all of us in playing in an ensemble,” said Cahn.

The personnel has remained constant through the years. “We’re five people who more or less have the same aesthetics and we’ve shared a lot of experiences over 20 years,” he said. “We’re all middle-aged, sad to say. Wiser and older. So we don’t have to waste time over egos in getting directly down to the music.”

Among their credits, the five-member group wrote and performed the music for the film, “The Man Who Skied Down Everest.” They have more than 10 recordings out and give between 20 and 40 concerts a year.

Takemitsu, a highly respected Japanese composer, is “a personal friend and a mentor to us for over 20 years,” Cahn said.

Before writing “From me . . . “ the composer visited Toronto to survey the array of percussion instruments that Nexus has assembled during their world tours. He utilized many of these instruments in his work.

World music, Cahn stressed, always has inventively utilized percussion instruments, which classical-music composers began extensively exploring only in this century.

He feels their own involvement in world music “enables us to look beyond traditional (Western) music for insight into what other people consider to be beautiful. It’s opened doors for us. . . . But we use it as a supplement to Western music, not in place of it.”

The Nexus Percussion Ensemble will appear with the Pacific Symphony under the direction of Carl St. Clair for the West Coast premiere of Toru Takemitsu’s “From me flows what you call Time” on Thursday and Friday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. St. Clair also will conduct one of Gabrieli’s Canzoni and Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony. Tickets: $12 to $36. Information: (714) 740-2000.