Southwest Chamber Music Charts Cage’s ‘Atlas Eclipticalis’

Southwest Chamber Music seems bent upon hammering John Cage’s “Atlas Eclipticalis” into the repertory. Two years ago, the ensemble performed and recorded this still-controversial piece during the “Radical PAST” festival, which commemorated the forward-looking Pasadena Art Museum and its Encounters music series. And not only did they reprise it as part of another ongoing festival, “The Universe,” Saturday night at the Norton Simon Museum, they use it as a biennial performance piece in their mentorship program at Pasadena’s John Muir High School--inoculating, as it were, the next generation.

The funny thing is, they just might succeed.

Greeted with hoots and derision from both audiences and performers when it was new nearly 40 years ago, “Atlas Eclipticalis” turns out to have remarkable staying power--if you can accept its static sense of time and space. The first time through is tough going if you expect music to move and develop. Yet after a few hearings, the body adjusts to the pace, and what seemed like random percussive pinpoints of sound assume a kind of order that is peaceful and unexpectedly absorbing.

Based upon chance-determined readings of star charts--hence the “universe” connection--each performance is unique, and the one led by Jeff von der Schmidt Saturday differed from the 1999 performances mainly in the sequence of events and the lack of distracting tomfoolery like performers munching on carrots and potato chips.

Other things remained the same--the time frame (exactly 49 minutes), baritone Michael Ingham and pianist Gayle Blankenburg superimposing performances of Cage’s “Songbooks” and “Winter Music” (though there was no soprano this time), and most crucially, the piece’s texture and ambience.

Blankenburg opened the concert with the solo piano version of Stockhausen’s “Zodiac,” with her crisp touch and light pedaling producing crystalline, pensive, haunting sequences that illuminated a perhaps-surprising Stockhausen gift for melody. Indeed, “Zodiac” did a better job of evoking the mystery of deep space than Cage--thankfully without Stockhausen’s astrology-based vocal text.

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The program repeats at 8 p.m. Tuesday at Zipper Concert Hall, Colburn School, 200 S. Grand Ave., downtown L.A. (800) 726-7147. $10-$25.