An E.A.R. for New Music : A group of former CalArts students finds the sweet sound of success as one of the nation’s leading eclectic ensembles.

When the California E.A.R. Unit takes the stage at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Bing Auditorium Wednesday night, they won’t be performing the percussion piece for amplified handcuffs they did last season. Nor will they offer a piece like the one by unit member Arthur Jarvinen, in which the players scream out a chant laced with obscenities, then hold their breath and bang on metal pipes while miked stethoscopes amplify their heartbeats. (They performed that one at New York’s Cathedral of St. John the Divine in 1986.)

No. The Wednesday concert will lack that certain anarchic element that characterizes many evenings with the E.A.R. Unit (the initials don’t stand for anything, and everyone pronounces it “Ear.”) But that doesn’t mean the evening will be filled with the kind of music you hear every day.

Since its emergence from the music program at California Institute for the Arts in the early 1980s, the group (which has eight standing and two occasional members) has established itself as one of the nation’s leading new music ensembles. They tour the world, performing their own pieces and specially commissioned works by 20th century composers from John Adams to Virko Baley to Elliott Carter and on down the alphabet.

In fact, the group’s dedication to the widest range of new music, combined with rigorous musicianship, is often cited as a source of its success. They unite the so-called “downtown” and “uptown” wings of new music, performing the experimental, electronic and conceptual side-by-side with more traditionally scored concert pieces, “surf[ing] the new music fringes in search of blissful expressive diversity,” as Josef Woodard has written in The Times.

The members would also point to their friendship and the group’s easy, collective nature. The core players are flutist Dorothy Stone, cellist Erika Duke-Kirkpatrick, keyboardists Lorna Eder and Vicki Ray, composer-percussionist-bass guitar player Jarvinen, percussionist Amy Knoles, violinist Robin Lorentz, and clarinet and sax player James Rohrig. Composers Rand Steiger and Stephen Mosko act as guest conductors and often contribute compositions. Stone serves as nominal artistic director, but everyone brings their interests and projects to the mix.

“We get to program, pick, commission who we want,” Stone says, “and when you have that kind of control over your musical life, it really means a lot.”

Stone will get a special workout Wednesday night as the unit shows off its more virtuosic side. She plays a major role in two pieces, one of which is the premiere of Sonatina for Flute by the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Mel Powell, who taught most of the E.A.R. members at CalArts.

“They really had to climb uphill to do what they’re doing,” says the composer, soon to be 73. “Every one of the group, I feel, is one of my children.”

Powell says Stone’s showcase piece “came about almost inadvertently. I have a system where I write quickly for relaxation--like my painter friends sketch,” he explains. “The first movement of the Sonatina was written quickly. Dorothy and I agreed it was attractive, so I decided to get serious about it.”

The Los Angeles-based composer will have another premiere on the program as well, Sextet, a co-commission of the E.A.R. Unit, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players and the New York New Music Ensemble.

The Powell compositions lead off a very locally oriented program, including an ensemble piece by jazz flutist turned composer James Newton (a CalArts alum); a live electronic piece by Jeff Perry (a CalArts attendee); and a piano piece by Mosko, who in addition to his role with the unit is also a professor at CalArts and the leader of the San Francisco Contemporary Music Group. The only scheduled piece with no local ties is a work for flute and violin by New York’s Randall Woolf.

The unit first came together in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s as the 20th Century Players at CalArts, where most of the current members were getting master’s degrees.

“It was a golden time,” recalls Duke-Kirkpatrick. The school sponsored a well-regarded new music festival in those years, and in addition to having the likes of Powell, Earle Brown and Morton Subotnick on the faculty, such 20th century giants as Milton Babbitt, John Cage, Morton Feldman and Louis Andriessen would come through town to teach and give workshops.

“We would spend a lot of time with them, playing their music, gaining inspiration. They’d all hang out at the Ranch House Inn in Valencia,” Duke-Kirkpatrick says.

After a 1982 tour of Holland, the 20th Century Players were determined to stay together. They debuted later that year as the California E.A.R. Unit with a concert at CalArts of works by the Texas composer Robert Rodriguez. Another early highlight was a 1984 series at the Santa Monica Place shopping mall.

“We’d get them to shut off the Muzak and fountains,” Steiger says. “We played Steve Reich’s ‘Six Pianos’ in a piano store. We did Terry Riley’s ‘In C’ “--a repetitive, hypnotic piece--”in the mall [hallway]. When it started, people were just going about their business. By the end, hundreds of people were gathered around, watching us play. We got complaints that we drew too many people out of the stores.”

The E.A.R. members consider the 1987 establishment of their residency at LACMA a turning point, with the museum’s music director, Dorrance Stalvey, giving them free rein to indulge their eclecticism and present an open-ended survey of major contemporary works.

“I like their thinking,” Stalvey says. “They’re very forward-looking, with no style bias or ax to grind. They can go from one of their own outrageous pieces to the difficult music of Elliott Carter.”

While all the members teach and play on recording sessions for other ensembles, and sometimes perform with other ensembles, there’s a tightknit “Friends”-style atmosphere when the unit gets together. Conversation around the kitchen table at Knoles’ downtown loft, a usual gathering place, can easily turn to the time the women in the group flamed everybody on AOL’s Model Rocketry chat room or the night in Minneapolis when Knoles somehow got every guy who walked into the hotel bar with a cellular phone to buy them a round of martinis.

“Most of the people in the group don’t have children--for whatever reason,” Jarvinen says. “So this group really has fulfilled a sort of family function.”

But it also provides a forum for exploration.

‘It’s really exciting to play new things,” says keyboardist Ray. “I’m sure there’s a million pianists who’ve played all the Beethoven repertoire. But when I play a brand-new piece I can establish my own traditions. It’s also really stimulating to your own musical imagination because there is no history to this new piece, and you constantly have to reinvent how you play your instrument.”

“This group was created to create an opportunity that was important to us,” Jarvinen says. “If this group wasn’t playing, there would be dozens and dozens of pieces that we would never have had a chance to play.”

Such as?

“I don’t know how a non-singer like myself would get the opportunity to learn Stockhausen’s ‘Stimmung,’ for six amplified vocalists. What other group would be stupid enough to program that piece with six non-singers? But we decided to bite it off and see if we could do it, and we pulled it off and perform the piece a lot.”

The group has four CDs and one CD-ROM in the stores now, with a flurry of new releases due for ‘96, including recordings featuring Louis Andriessen’s “Zilver” (on New Albion), Morton Feldman’s “For Philip Guston” (on Bridge), and Virko Baley’s “Dreamtime” (on Cambria). In addition, there are two more concerts at LACMA this spring and some road trips in the works, highlighted by the prestigious Serious Speakout tour, a trek through Great Britain this fall.

With all this, perhaps the E.A.R. Unit’s greatest satisfaction these days is that it seems to have reached, perhaps even created, a core audience that not only accepts but also seeks out the new and unusual. Reed player Rohrig recalls “Druber,” a Gerhard Stabler piece for six amplified “screamers” that closed out the ‘94-’95 LACMA season. Jarvinen picks up the story:

“[It was] very theatrical, we weren’t even using instruments. We were yelling and screaming and rolling around on the stage, and we were drooling and making weird little gurgling sounds in the microphones. By now, all of those gestures have been done in such extreme ways. . . . You can now do those things very legitimately and people may or may not like them, but not too many people who are coming to our concerts are going to walk out and say, ‘That wasn’t music.’ ”

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CALIFORNIA E.A.R UNIT, Leo S. Bing Theater, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd. Date: Wednesday, 8 p.m. Price: $7-$15. Phone: (213) 857-6010.