New York New Music Ensemble Serves Some Tasty Samples

The New York New Music Ensemble showed up this week for what has become virtually an annual visit to the Monday Evening Concerts series at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, offering this year’s model of what’s new. It was an agreeable, if not entirely cogent sampler plate, played with an overall precision and commitment to the cause.

“Near Distance” is a fine example of Chinese-born composer Chen Yi’s culture-blending skills, tapping into a third quality beyond the sum of the East-meets-West parts. “Piping Hot,” an effective case of an electro-acoustic conversation written by Arthur Kreiger, pitted the musky timbre of Jayn Rosenfeld’s bass flute against the responses of taped electronics.

Thomas Ades’ “Catch” was the drollest piece of the night, in which clarinetist Jean Kopperud defied classical formality by playing in the aisles, from backstage, as a dancing pied piper and, briefly, sitting on stage amid the seated trio. Transcending its central gimmick, the work has handsome form and wit.

Morton Feldman, who died in 1987, has gained a reputation as a forbidding, esoteric avant-gardist, when, in fact, his music can be uniquely sensuous, as in 1961’s “Durations IV” for violin, cello and vibraphone. Because players are “free to choose their own durations within a given general tempo,” the shelf life of each note varies.

Separate musical voices, which might seem aloof or random, meet at various junctures, creating accidental harmonies. Compared to Feldman’s later, extended pieces, this was a concise number. But still, time seemed suspended, another splendid Feldman-esque effect.

David Schiff’s “Scenes From Adolescence” closed the program with its restlessly energetic drive. In musical transit, the composer bumps into the respective influences of Bud Powell, Sidney Bechet and Martha and the Vandellas. Or so he says in his notes. To some ears, it sounds like a lateral cousin of Minimalism, that riff-intensive, pop-inclusive, hyphen-happy mother of all easy-does-it pre-post-modernism.