A Striking Display of Percussion’s History

The 20th century has been a noisy century, and no matter what we do, it just gets noisier. Ban all the leaf blowers you want, it won’t matter. We still have rock ‘n’ roll, and you can’t get rid of all the percussionists.

But as they have done throughout history, artists uncover the hidden beauty in their surroundings. That has been the role of percussion in capturing the spirit of the modern age. And that was the spirit of the program that the percussion ensemble red fish blue fish brought from UC San Diego to the Japan America Theatre on Monday night, as part of the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Green Umbrella series.

That spirit can emerge through various cultures, and the young players, led by Stephen Schick, struck out, so to speak, near and far. The earliest piece, which opened the program, was George Antheil’s “Ballet Mecanique.” It was originally meant for a surrealist film by Man Ray and Dudley Murphy, in which Ferdinand Leger also got involved. But in the ‘20s, film and music never came together, and it was the music alone, premiered in Paris in 1924, that set off a sensation, helping noisily launch modernism. Everyone--James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Marcel Duchamp, Serge Koussevitzky, Alfred Knopf--was there.

Performed in a version for four pianos and percussion, red fish blue fish united sight and sound, putting the film together with the music. There is a fit, but oddly neither benefits. The film’s strange loops of images are odder in silence. The music, with its great thrusts of automated rhythms and noise-making, doesn’t seem as daring when it accompanies.

At the other end of the program, the world and the century, Tan Dun’s “Snow in June” uses an amplified solo cello and four percussionists with all manner of wood, skin and metal instruments. It is an exotic piece that lasts nearly half an hour, in which the solo cello first stands apart from the exotic percussion but eventually becomes drawn into the rich sonic environment.

The soloist was Maya Beiser, cellist for the Bang on a Can All Stars (of which Schick is the percussionist). Tan’s music is theatrical, and Beiser is the perfect protagonist for it. She is an intense and dazzling player with a striking stage presence--slicked-back hair and tight leather pants.

Also on hand was Louis Andriessen’s “Hoketus.” Schick probably put it there because the hard-edged Dutch minimalist is a favorite of the Bang on a Can group, and the 1975 work, a mesmerizing display of agitated, sharp melody shot back and forth between two antiphonal groups of players (which include saxophones and pan pipes, as well as percussion), is one of the momentous pieces of European modernism.

But this is violently anti-establishment music, and it was heard with a certain sense of amusement Monday, a scant six weeks before Willem Wijnbergen leaves the Concertgebouw to take over as general manager of our Philharmonic. Andriessen, an internationally influential figure, has practically made a career of attacking the Concertgebouw and demonstrating alternatives to writing for traditional orchestras.

The program also included a less than ideally witty performance of John Cage’s “Credo in US.” Writing a dance piece for Merce Cunningham and Jean Erdmann in 1942, Cage reacted to the somber, populist art of wartime with a satire on American mores. Piano and tin-can percussion are joined by record player (or radio). The revolutionary idea is to contrast, say, a Dvorak symphony with modern music.

The group red fish blue fish chose radio. But with modern radio stations offering nothing more than backbeat and prattle, all the fun is gone. That’s the noisy modern world for you, too brash and loud even for Cage now.

Not that delicate sounds have disappeared entirely, as Schick indicated in a sensitive solo performance of Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho’s exquisite “Six Japanese Gardens.”