Far-Flung Influences in ‘Focus on California’

Not all of the music Monday night in “Focus on California,” the first installment in Monday Evening Concerts’ four-part festival, was made in California. But the program in the Los Angeles County Museum’s Leo S. Bing Theater did, nonetheless, help compensate for the musical inadequacies of the museum’s current “Made in California” blockbuster show.

Wander the galleries and you will hear plenty of music. Visit the gift shop, and you will have the opportunity to purchase a souvenir CD of the show. And if you have a taste for Al Jolson, Frankie Avalon and the Jefferson Airplane, you will go home happy.

What you won’t hear is the gratifying racket of banging tin cans in extremely interesting cross rhythms. You won’t find any notice of a glorious character, Harry Partch, who was a hobo, instrument builder and inventor of a music that combined freight-train-hopping, ancient Greek drama and Chinese musical theory.

You won’t have a sense of how an early California composer, Henry Cowell, embraced the multitude of cultures that surrounded him. Or how Californian Terry Riley--in responding to hippie culture, John Coltrane, John Cage and early Western contrapuntal music--came up with the first masterpiece of Minimalism, “In C.” Nor, for that matter, is there any sense of a young Cage intuiting from his traditional studies with Schoenberg at UCLA, a revolutionary way to make music by applying Schoenberg’s formal techniques to noise, not pitch.

The Monday program, supplied by red fish blue fish, the visiting percussion ensemble from UC San Diego, directed by Steven Schick, could hardly tell that whole story. But it did, at least, fill in some essential gaps, especially since it was preceded by a too rarely seen half-hour documentary, “The Dreamer That Remains: A Portrait of Harry Partch.”

The film, sympathetically directed by Stephen Pouliot, captured Partch shortly before his death in 1974 as an irascible, irresistible original who tells us he decided two things at age 14--to become a composer and not, under any circumstances, to be tied down to convention. To see and hear not just the man, but his wonderful instruments, and to hear him describe and demonstrate how music can be both exotically theoretical and vibrantly corporeal reveals more, I think, about our state than the same half-hour spent reading earnest, politically correct labels in LACMA’s galleries.

The musical program began with Cowell’s short, delightful “Ostinato Pianissimo,” written in 1934 and one of the earliest concert works for percussion ensemble. The piece was actually composed in New York, where Cowell was teaching at the New School for Social Research, but it has a California sound, with its sense of contact with Asian and Latino culture and its ingenious structure of interlocking ostinato--or fixed-pitched--patterns.

Lou Harrison’s Concerto for Violin and Percussion is another work with a New York genesis, but it, too, has a particularly California flavor. It was written in the ‘40s in New York, and it was inspired by a hearing of the Berg Violin Concerto. But, back in California, Harrison rewrote it in 1959, and the final score is uniquely West Coast, with its expressive and dancing violin line surrounded by luminous percussion accompaniment that often alludes to the golden sound of an Indonesian gamelan orchestra.

Cage’s “First Construction (In Metal)” was written in Seattle in 1939, but it, too, carries on with the percussion experiments he had begun a few years earlier, along with Cowell and Harrison, in his home state. Each of six percussionists has 16 different sounds (including those obtained from brake drums, water gongs, thundersheets, temple gongs and all manner of bells and other exotic instruments) playing independent rhythmic patterns. The impression is sonic chaos on the surface and then a sense that many independent voices can actually get along with one another if each is given its own space.

The concert ended with an hourlong version of “In C,” which takes the early principles of Cowell, Harrison, Partch and Cage a step further. Any instruments and any number of them can play. Every player has the same short patterns in the same order, but the number of repetitions is up to each musician. A continual pulse (which became the motor of Minimalism) keeps the music going. A ragtag band maintains each individual voice yet marches inmerry and transcendent lock-step.

The veteran virtuoso, Hungarian violinist Janos Negyesy, did a fine job of conveying the choreographic flare of the solo part in Harrison’s concerto (although his intonation was less appealing). The young percussionists who make up the ensemble were sure and strong and convincing in all they played.