ICE Weaves Vision Into the Music

One might suspect an attitude flippant and/or trippy from an ensemble known as Intergalactic Contemporary Ensemble, a.k.a. ICE. But what the Minneapolis-based group instead demonstrated, in its Monday Evening Concerts program at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art this week, was solid musical cohesion and serious vision. What’s in a name?

Music from different corners of the American landscape, from a film score to the private world of expatriate Conlon Nancarrow, bookended the program. To open, Thomas Newman’s fascinating score for “American Beauty,” arranged by ICE conductor Duane Schulthess, had its West Coast premiere.

Newman’s 1999 work, with its use of marimbas, twisted touches of Americana (including dulcimer) and carefully interlaced parts, followed a post-minimalist scheme and translated well to the concert stage.

Closing the program was Nancarrow’s “Study for Player Piano, No. 7,” in an arrangement by Charles Schwobel and Yvar Mikhashoff. It was the fiendish complexity of Nancarrow’s music, full of polyrhythms, polytonality, and poly-everything that led him to rely on the player piano for decades.

The music’s tricky maze, fleshed out by varying instrumental colors, proved uniquely exciting. Its finale was a show stealer. “Requiem for a Dancer” was a stylistically restless, smartly laid-out musical canvas by Dorrance Stalvey. ICE’s resident composer, Edie Hill, explored sonic and symbolic metamorphosis in “Butterfly Effect.” Minneapolis-based Zeitgeist also appeared, navigating the intricate clapping adventure of Mary Ellen Childs’ “Hands.”