Harmony Heard in Disparate Styles : Music: Pianist Thomas J. Lymenstull finds Western and Chinese traditions complementary.

Travelers today frequently lament ever-growing Western influences abroad, such as Taco Bells in Moscow.

But pianist Thomas J. Lymenstull, who made his latest trip to China to assess the state of contemporary Western music there, finds much to celebrate in the marriage of two widely disparate musical traditions.

Lymenstull cited one of the Chinese works he’ll play Thursday in Seal Beach--one based on poems about the nature of poetry--as an example.

“The music is really quite beautiful--what you and I would call mildly modern,” said Lymenstull, 40, of Lin Hua’s set of preludes and fugues titled “On Reading Si Kong Tu’s Personalities of Poetry.”

“They clearly have elements of 12-tone writing, but they don’t sound like 12-tone music,” Lymenstull said, “more like the more luscious writing of Paul Hindemith.

“But because of the choices as to what pitches to use, and what textures, the music still clearly sounds Chinese. You can identify typical rhythms, and, while the music is not what I would call pentatonic, you find certain intervals that would typically appear in pentatonic music.

“It’s 12-tone writing, with Chinese character.”

Lymenstull’s program, part of the Seal Beach Chamber Music Festival, also includes Haydn’s Sonata in G, Hob. XVI, No. 40; Stephen Hartke’s “Post-Modern Homages”; Chen Yi’s “Duo Ye” and Chopin’s Barcarolle. (The series continues with chamber music and piano recitals Thursday evenings though Aug. 10.)

Chen Yi’s work was written before the composer moved to the United States; she’s now composer-in-residence for two Northern California performing groups, a cappella vocal group Chanticleer and the Bay Area Women’s Philharmonic orchestra.

Lymenstull, an Altadena resident and associate professor in piano pedagogy at USC, first visited China four years ago. In 1992, he performed there. Last summer, he went purely for research purposes.

“I visited all but one of the leading conservatories, most in Beijing and Shanghai,” Lymenstull recalled, “but also many others, with the intent of finding music, meeting composers, interviewing them, finding out what they’re trying to do when they write, the kind of considerations they think about when they’re writing. They seem to be free to write in any style they want now, as opposed to [in] the past.

“I discovered an incredibly wide variety of styles,” he said. At one end of the spectrum, “I found very conservative romantic music and arrangements of folk tunes. . . . [And then] there are also a number of composers working in more contemporary styles.”

Lymenstull brought back hundreds of new works; he hopes to continue performing the best among them and possibly to publish them.

Lymenstull has performed locally with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra and with the Kronos Quartet and was recently named a teaching fellow of the USC Center for Excellence in Teaching.

Among the pedagogy courses he leads at USC is one focusing on practical keyboard skills for keyboard majors.

“We not only do sight-reading, improvisation, score reading and transposition, but tie those skills together so that students first of all better understand what they’re playing,” Lymenstull said.

He wants students “not only to be able to look at a score and read it well, but to be better musicians; not just to use analysis to get through theory classes, but as a way to find meaning in the music.

“We try to bridge the distance between what we know about keyboard theory and history and what we do at the keyboard,” he said. “What’s really exciting is how much more powerful the effect is in a performance when a pianist can relate those theoretical skills.”

* Pianist Thomas J. Lymenstull performs works by Haydn, Stephen Hart, Chen Yi, Lin Hua and Chopin on Thursday at McGaugh School Auditorium, 1698 Bolsa Ave., Seal Beach. 8 p.m. Free. (310) 431-7322.