EAR Unit Puts the Focus on Experiments in Film Music

The urge to visualize music has always been irresistible. It goes back as far as ancient Greece and probably much further. So it should hardly surprise us that when film was new, composers were attracted like moths to the flickering light of projectors.

For a wonderful, explosive moment in the ‘20s and ‘30s, experiments in film, music, theater and the visual arts were all of kind. And it was of that time that the California EAR Unit chose to remind us Monday at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

The history lesson comes in handy, given the upcoming exhibition of Bill Viola’s sight and sound explorations at LACMA; Yo-Yo Ma’s expected Bach music videos; the unveiling next spring of the L.A. Philharmonic’s film/music commissions; and word of a new “Fantasia.”

And the history that the EAR Unit provided was rare and telling. Most extraordinary was a short abstract film, “R-1, Ein Formspiel,” by Oskar Fischinger from the mid-’20s. Fischinger, an important German film experimentalist, emigrated to L.A. in the ‘30s where he applied his experiments to Hollywood--”Fantasia” and TV’s early commercials would have been unthinkable without him. And for Fischinger, advances in film were unthinkable without music to go along with them.

In “R-1,” circles, lines and gelatinous figures are actors in a cosmic drama. Apparently, percussion music was played live with “R-1”; the EAR Unit demonstrated that “Double Music,” written by John Cage (once an assistant of Fischinger’s in L.A.) and Lou Harrison in 1941, fit with uncanny ease.

The other rare film was the brief introduction by Rene Clair to the ballet “Rela^che,” with music by Satie. Here Satie and Surrealist artist Francis Picabia jump up and down, a cannon spins on its own, and the music, arranged for the EAR Unit by flutist Dorothy Stone, mimics the quirkiness of it all.

That sense of inventive play is probably the greatest challenge these works present to modern filmmakers. Certainly there was little beyond a pleasing chaos to be found in the modern films on the program, those by Lawrence Brose meant to go along with Cage’s “Ryoanji” and Conlon Nancarrow’s Study #23. But both got exciting performances.

“Ryoanji” is environmental music, and Stone, playing live with herself prerecorded on tape, bent the sound of her flute brilliantly to capture the sense of sand raked around rocks in a Japanese garden. Lorna Eder did the impossible in the Nancarrow, playing a player-piano piece live in a transcription by Ivar Mikhashoff.

The rest of the program was unrelated to film, but not to the environment or vision. R. Wiley Evans re-created the sounds of crossing the Golden Gate Bridge by placing the performers, honking and banging, across the museum’s courtyard in his “Ol De Tidge.” Jeffery Brook’s “The Thinking Flame” was made of erratic jazzy snippets that moved like a cartoon. Arthur Jarvinen’s “White Lights Lead to Red” unleashed engaging rhythms leading to fireworks of rock-like riffs. Stephen L. Mosko’s “Psychotropes,” an intricate array of small patterns, felt very compatible with Fischinger’s intricacies.