EAR Unit Skillfully Presents Five Local Premieres

The California EAR Unit’s appearance Monday at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art was another sign that civilization prevails. Now celebrating its 20th anniversary, the ensemble’s mission is not necessarily to soothe, but they do, by championing new music with conviction, incisive skill and a sense of fun.

In the kickoff of the Monday Evening Concerts series, the EAR Unit offered five local premieres. The centerpiece was Louis Andriessen’s score for Hal Hartley’s short film “The New Math(s),” a seriocomic ditty about mazes, martial arts-y maneuvers and crossed signals--which also describes the post-Minimalist music. In his new score for the 1928 film “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Jeff Rona’s mode of Minimalism was a bad fit for the film’s experimental, expressionistic style.

Ken Steen’s “birddog” opened the concert with a scheme of chase and release and a satisfying mix of tensions. Other works dealt with sound’s sculptural possibilities, including Kaija Saariaho’s “Cendres,” a slalom between idiomatic and similar timbres among piano, flute and cello.

Jim Fox’s effectively ethereal “Solo for Single-Reed Instrument” had the fewest notes on paper and one of the strongest impacts. Marty Walker played spare, finely detailed phrases on bass clarinet with elegant simplicity. Charlotte Seicher’s “Playing Both Ends Toward the Middle” found violinist Robin Lorentz and cellist Erika Duke-Kirkpatrick producing fraying tones with scraps of melody vying for, but denied, resolution.