In Harmony With Nature, Southwest Honors Mosko

Stephen L. Mosko is, to all who know him or know of him, Lucky. His students at CalArts call him by that nickname, as do his colleagues in the major new music ensembles he leads or has led in places like San Francisco and Chicago. But “lucky” was also his condition Sunday afternoon at the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena, where Southwest Chamber Music celebrated his 50th birthday with a concert devoted to his music.

Luck, real luck, is not happenstance. It is not winning the lottery and then allowing the money to ruin your life, but is, rather, the ability to take pleasure from and advantage of the world as it is offered.

The luck in this case came from the heavens. It poured rain on the roof of a gallery space that is intimate and alive in its acoustic, but not acoustically isolated from the outside. The thunderstorms, loud and dramatic, sometimes came close to overwhelming the music. But the music, abstract and subtle in its explorations of colors and sonic effects, was not spoiled. Rather, nature completed the picture.

Mosko is a composer whose style is influenced by the musical modernism of the 1950s and ‘60s. It revolves abstractly around itself, making its own rules, creating its own sound world. This is a school of music that has no end of detractors, who claim it has robbed music of its humanity.

Just last Thursday, for instance, John Mauceri, the music director of the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra and a former classmate of Mosko at Yale, speaking before a conference of classical music radio broadcasters in Los Angeles, attacked the modernism of the European school for having militantly overwhelmed the more traditional styles of composition after World War II. And also last week, at an international economic conference in Switzerland, cellist Julian Lloyd Webber (brother of Andrew Lloyd Webber) did much the same thing, going so far as to accuse the insidious influence of a modernist cabal for having set the stage for a perceived crisis in classical music in the West today.

Mosko’s music Sunday afternoon--pieces written between 1985 and the present for various combinations of flute, piano, guitar and cello--is just this kind of music. One does not sense in it--in the flutter-tonguing and raspy bursts of sound from the flute or in the almost geometric patterns of chords on the piano--any direct sense of the composer’s personality or personableness. One does not hear, in the listening, quite how the music is made.

But what one does hear is nature, and this is where the rain helped. Mosko’s music sounds. It exalts in the extraordinary variety of sonics, in the richness and fullness, say, of the solo flute. The rain on top of those pure sounds offered context. We think of the flute as a liquid instrument; we think of loud attacks on clusters of notes on the piano as thunderous. The rain reminded of just how much we make music to bring us closer to nature, not remove us from it.

On the program were the dramatic “Indigenous Music II” for solo flute; “Rupuze,” an exploration of mysterious intersections between breathy flute and transient decays of guitar sounds; and “Rendering,” a similar essay for piano. These are short works. The one more extended composition, “for Morton Feldman” was a beautiful 20-minute trio for flutes of various sizes, piano and cello, that captured the otherworldly music of Feldman without actually evoking it.

The performances were highlighted by the startling virtuosity of flutist Dorothy Stone as well as engaging and devoted contributions of Stuart Fox (guitar), Maggie Edmondson (cello) and Susan Svrcek (piano). And the gallery itself contributed with a visual component, an exhibition of California abstraction, which suited the music perfectly. Concert-goers are rarely so lucky to find such harmony between all the external elements of a concert and the music itself.

* Southwest Chamber Music will perform Stephen Mosko’s “Psychotropics” as part of its regular concert series Thursday, 8 p.m., at Museum of Tolerance, 9786 Pico Blvd., and Saturday, 8 p.m., at Pasadena Presbyterian Church, 585 E. Colorado Blvd. $10-$20. “Psychotropics” will also be the focus of the series, Breaking the Code of Contemporary Music, Friday at 8 p.m., Armory Center for the Arts, 145 N. Raymond, Pasadena. $10. For all programs: (800) 726-7147.