Music & Dance Reviews : Independent Composers Assn. Closes Season With Santa Monica Performances

Factionalism is the dark side of diversity, but the Independent Composers Assn. has always coped with stylistic plurality better than many other new-music organizations. Certainly its concert Saturday at the Ruth Bachofner Gallery in Santa Monica, closing its 16th season, proved a wide ranging stimulus to ear and mind.

Eliane Robert-George’s “Passionis” is a three-movement instrumental Mass, its collisions of oppressive chords and desperate bits of chant launched with an industrial keening. Violinist Peter Kent, cellist Roger Lebow and pianist Gloria Cheng made its first performance a well-integrated and persuasively tense one.

The other premiere on the program was excerpts from Frederick Moore’s theater piece for radio, “Lives of the Saints.” Against an evocative and varied tape background, Moore told Brautiganesque stories alive with an uncritical love of language and trendy expressions of being, and punctuated with the pungent, imaginative sax work of Timothy Taylor.

Scott Fraser’s deft tape collage of Persian singing and lush synthetic washes, “Ancient Gates,” is also an excerpt, being the third movement of “Azan.”

Exploring its textures and multicultural riffing was Eve Kikawa, dancing with mists of sand in Liz Stillwell Fraser’s pertinent lighting. Clad in loose black suggesting a post-modern chador , Kikawa relied on ritual gestures rich in allusion.

“Trains,” an electronically sophisticated, sonically assaultive wreck by Chorus of Souls (Tom Bailey, Tom Connors and Kenny Lefort), relied more on visuals, but its train yard slides only subtracted from the effect of the volcanic performance. Sampled train sounds rumbled with the whine of stressed metals and an electric guitar goosed, beaten and ultimately sawed in a noisy ride to destructions real and metaphoric.

Standing in contrast to all of this were Burt Goldstein’s “Trielynvar” and Alfred Carlson’s “Dialogues.” Both are accomplished forays in more traditional linearity, the former in a rhapsodic neo-Romantic mode, the latter chatting in retro serialism.

Both are also virtuosic in instrumental requirements. Flutist Angela Wiegand, vibraphonist David Johnson and pianist Vicki Ray traced “Trielynvar” with supple vehemence, while oboist Gordon Lazarus and pianist Theodora Carras Primes delivered “Dialogues” with spunk and eloquence.