Ample Helping of Minimalist Fare

New music in Los Angeles enjoys a steady but irregular presence. Suddenly, in the past week, a sprinkle became a downpour, as the CalArts Musical Explorations festival joined with other performances around town to bring the case of contemporary music--Minimalism, in particular--before the public.

The goal of the several CalArts-related events was not to play music of the best-known composers in the idiom, but to examine life before, after and to the side of Minimalism.

Monday night in MOCA’s Ahmanson Theater, the emphasis was electronic. Minimal gestures toward maximum effect was the m.o. for James Tenney’s mind-expanding “For Ann (rising),” the only taped piece of the program. In this mesmerizing study in perception, we hear a continuous loop of rising tones, one displacing the next on a greased stairway to heaven. In real time, Mark Trayle issued the rapid series of texturally provocative, discrete sound modules of Christian Wolff’s “For 1, 2 or 3 People.”

Kyle Gann performed the tight singspiel narration for his wonderfully peculiar “Custer and Sitting Bull.” Snippets of text from those historical figures are cannily pitted against a backdrop of mostly taped synthesizer parts, all cheesy timbres and pentatonic simplicity, but rendered exotic via microtonal tuning.

Finally, John D.S. Adams and D’Arcy Philip Gray expertly manned patchworks of sound-modifying toys, freely interpreting the prerecorded sound source of David Tudor’s “Neural Network Plus.” The resulting sonic palette expressed sobriety, nattering drama and winking humor.

Tuesday’s Green Umbrella concert at the Japan America Theater, where the L.A. Philharmonic and CalArts joined forces as presenters, was well-rendered by the CalArts New Century Players, and well-intentioned, but it was also a bit anticlimactic. The final program in the festival, it posed more questions about the future of Minimalism than it answered.

Lois V Vierk’s rumbling nicety “Timberline” attempts a programmatic vision of its title but was too harmonically homogenous and lacking in tension to keep up interest. William Duckworth’s “Mysterious Numbers” followed its own glib, unremarkable post-Minimalist course, veering toward jazz and perhaps klezmer music but ultimately going nowhere. At least Shaun Naidoo’s “Bad Times Coming,” for piano (with the able Vicki Ray at the keys) and percussion group, wears its embrace of camp and bombast honestly, with an often raucous, even rock-ish, energy.

The best work came from composer and bowed-piano specialist Stephen Scott, a cult hero in the Minimalist saga. Ten players scrambled around a lidless piano performing excerpts from his “Vikings of the Sunrise,” showing that Scott’s work is not a perversion but an artful and logical extension of pianistic function. Here, form, content and process got along just fine.