Music Reviews : California E.A.R. Gives Its Strongest Concert of Season

As a matter of course and ensemble philosophy, the California E.A.R. Unit tends to surf the new music fringes in search of a blissful expressive diversity. The ensemble’s Monday Evening Concert at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, however, held to a specific agenda, devoted to works commissioned by the 4-decades-old, Harvard-based Fromm Music Foundation.

A tacit agenda had to do with the power of an influential commissioning body to shape musical culture. And what is that shape, according to this survey? Polymorphous . . . and blissfully diverse. By and large, this was the strongest E.A.R. Unit concert heard this season.

The E.A.R. Unit’s concert shifted from dark and dense to the light-headed splendor of the finale, Kamran Ince’s “Hammer Music.” With a title based on synthesized hammer blows, Ince’s stylistically energized piece veers from Indonesianlike sonorities to tinkly Hollywoodisms. Fast, jittery phrases erupt out of a dark minimalist lilt, a la Frank Zappa, with good-hearted idiomatic deviance emerging as the aesthetic guiding light.

The world premiere of Kathryn Alexander’s “As Long-Drawn Echoes From Afar Converging” opened the program, the knotty, modular form of which emphasized opposites of rhythm and taut/loose organization. Rand Steiger’s 1988 work “13 Loops”--also episodic by design--found protagonist flutist Dorothy Stone triggering a series of looping phrases in the ensemble, amid Steiger’s serialism-meets-and-roughs-up-minimalism compositional scheme. Between the isms, it’s not an entirely happy marriage, but it’s a heated and interesting one.

Percussionist Amy Knoles rose to the not-inconsiderable challenge of David Lang’s “Anvil Chorus,” requiring Knoles to beat out time with one hand while outlining syncopated accents and counter rhythms with the other. With digitally emulated metal timbres, the work set up a paradox of pre- and post-industrial processes.

Perhaps the most satisfying piece of music on the program was Jeffrey Stademan’s “Marxville Songbook,” a two-movement work given its L.A. premiere. At once cerebral and vivid, Stademan shows a painterly way with atonal fragments, deftly dispersed in time and glazed with a dry wit. Moments of rhythmic regularity and consonance are like fleeting glimpses of objects in a fog--a pleasant, mystery-shrouded fog. Likewise, the evening.