Stockhausen and Bouman Deliver Sound Ideas

Accomplished and entertaining, the duo of Markus Stockhausen and Tara Bouman--he plays trumpets, she plays clarinets, and both play a variety of percussion instruments--closed the Monday Evening Concert season, this week in Leo S. Bing Theater at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

This was a gentle and varied demonstration of a few of the possibilities these journeyman musicians have discovered as a duo.

As composers and improvisers, they are obsessed with the effects of small changes in timbre and texture in the progression of each piece.

As a result, everything they do is interesting, if not always compelling.

As performers, they are focused and concentrated on the moment; thus, they hold their listeners rapt even when little musical activity is taking place.

Within its engaging two-hour program, the duo played short and medium-long pieces, with titles like “Phoenix” and “Dialogue.”

One, the title of which was not revealed, found Stockhausen exploring the dynamic properties of a single cymbal, for more than four minutes. Fascinating.

“Tara,” Stockhausen’s seven-movement basset-horn suite for Bouman, held interest through mood-play; she moved to a different part of the Bing stage for each part of the piece.

The second half of the evening was occupied by a work, “The Creative Power of Sound,” described as “composed and intuitive music for clarinet and trumpet with electronics.”

The electronics proved too subtle for these ears, but the use of bass drum and tam-tam (like the gong in the J. Arthur Rank movie titles) added color to the players’ flights of improvisation.

There was, in this piece and in this program, nothing startling, innovative or fresh, yet it pleased.