EAR Unit Throws an Eclectic, Fun Party

A sane New Year’s Eve left Los Angeles a laughingstock among manic millennial revelers, and concert life here was quiet as well. But a night without silliness hardly means the party is over for the city of the future. The first 10 days of the new year have been a musical celebration in Southern California.

First, Esa-Pekka Salonen’s program of his music with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, an unforgettable concert people can’t stop talking about and certainly a profound wake-up call for the orchestra. Next, a celebration from Pacific Symphony that included a new work for the occasion from Richard Danielpour along with some Verdi singing by Deborah Voigt that may not be bettered for quite some time.

And then on Monday at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the contrary California EAR Unit, counting correctly and acknowledging the timing as early in the last year of the old millennium rather than the start of a new one, held a wrap party with 14 new pieces written for the occasion (and one apology--percussionist Amy Knoles was robbed of all her equipment in Indonesia last week and her piece had to be postponed). Silliness was welcome but not required.

It began and ended in festivity and bubble-blowing. A processional by Alison Knowles, the gentle queen of Fluxus, the anarchic multimedia art movement begun in the early ‘60s, opened the evening. In visual work, poetry or performance, Knowles is a nurturing artist who cultivates more than she challenges, who demonstrates ways in which to take comfort in our environment. Her “Peeking at the Millennium” had the players walking down the aisles of the Leo S. Bing Theater, tooting softly but ending up in a raucous “Auld Lang Syne,” waved on by fez-sporting percussionist-turned-semaphorist Arthur Jarvinen.

Two hours later, there were more bubbles, popping balloons, confetti, hilarious Hawaiian pop played by the band and, this time, dancing in the aisles. The piece--”Some Variations on a Theme of Sol Bright,” by Stephen L. Mosko, a musical free spirit but also a quite serious conductor and modernist composer--was, in fact, performed all evening by plants in the audience who slyly handed out messages and candy during the concert and took mock musical surveys during intermission. And it was indicative of an interesting aspect of the program.

The more serious composers saw the event as a delightful madcap occasion. The more typically unfettered musicians, especially those in the free-jazz world, tended to be soberly sincere. And younger composers were stuffier than the older ones.

Hence, John Bergamo, the veteran CalArts percussionist, had the most amusing work, “Easy Schlepp,” in which four EAR Unit women sat on the edge of the stage and beat out infectious rhythms on their thighs with tuned plastic tubes. Dorrance Stalvey, the director of the Monday Evening Concerts (under whose aegis the evening was presented) and a modernist composer himself, also had a quirky charmer in “Preview,” with its chirpy scales and trills and percussive chords disarmed by a bluesy harmonica. A good mix of minimalism and pop made Randall Woolf’s “Have You Ever?” attractive.

On the other hand, works by quite young composers, including two quiet ones by Ryan Francesconi (“10 Hour Conversation” and “Web Bar Was Sad”) and the deafening one by Adam Lane (“Mini-Pig 2000”), were more about individual ego than group celebration. Avant-garde jazz works by Wadada Leo Smith, Vinny Golia and Nels Cline shared a dated 1960s experimental aesthetic and were all curiously dreary.

Robert Kyr’s neo-Reniassance “Millennium Dreamscape” (the only work that wasn’t a first performance) was a long (10 minutes) look back. Lindsay Vickery’s “Horology” was a clever rhythmic interplay of clock-like parts winding up and down; but EAR Unit violinist Robin Lorentz made the same point in her “Spit and . . . “ more elegantly by putting a microphone next to a music box.

Still, good music was not necessarily the point Monday night. The California EAR Unit makes its own rules and creates its own environment, and then it serves that environment with respect. There were no notes about the music; a listener was free to simply listen. It was, in the end, a good party.