EAR Unit Returns With Distinction

An odd sight greeted visitors to the opening concert of the EAR Unit’s season at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art on Wednesday. Art Jarvinen was in the audience. A founding member of the new music group, Jarvinen has recently departed to pursue composing. Another change puts Marty Walker now officially in the clarinet chair.

New stage face, but same mission. The EAR Unit presented an impressive and balanced concert, showing what they’re made of.

The group has never been afraid to blend serious intent with dadaistic humor, so it was perfectly fitting to open the season with the L.A. premiere of Phillip Kent Bimstein’s “Garland Hirschi’s Cows.” Written in 1993, it is a smart hoot of a piece, with an integral tape backdrop of interview snippets with Mr. Hirschi, a Utah dairy farmer, chopped up Steve Reich-like, and assorted manipulations of actual cow-generated “moo” material.

To this, the ensemble brought a vibrant live score, replete with bass clarinet tones resembling the bass harmonica of the “Green Acres” soundtrack and cello timbres emulating the lazy gargles of cow song. They navigated clippety-clop minimal rhythms but also a plaintive melodic leitmotif that illuminates the serious secret musical life of this work.

As with the Bimstein piece, David Lang’s engaging small gem, “sweet air,” has a post-Minimalist scheme, but the cool calculations and air of an “ism” are removed, and the charm left intact. A gentle, loopy mesh of lines bumps into soft dissonance, on an otherwise pleasantly hypnotic course.

On less tonal turf, we also heard Jacob Druckman’s “Dark Wind,” in which cellist Erika Duke-Kirkpatrick and violinist Robin Lorentz faced each other, literally and musically. Ching-Wen Chao’s “Departure Tracings,” a requiem for her father, is a series of delicate sonic events based on an augmented interval, hung in the air like parts of a mobile in time rather than space. Guest tabla players Greg Johnson and Daniel Kennedy joined the stage for CalArts percussion teacher John Bergamo’s “Piru Bole,” which leans into the wind of “world music,” with its infectious East Indian rhythmic maze.

Kennedy returned as the nimble central force in the closing piece, Steven Mackey’s “Micro-Concerto for Percussion and Five Instruments,” a fine showpiece for the Unit. Mackey’s distinctive sense of how to balance colors, avoid obvious structures and spin kinetic rhythms is nicely evident in this 1999 work. Here is music both accessible and esoteric, true to its own rules, which could also be said of this new music ensemble.