Altering forms, altering minds

If you really want to defy Euclid at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art “Beyond Geometry” show, map out a fairly rigorous path to a distant corner of the gallery. There you will find short texts from 1960 by the composer La Monte Young. They instruct a performer to draw a straight line and follow it, hold a two-note chord for a very long time, feed a bale of hay and bucket of water to a piano.

But even when (slightly) more traditional composers toyed with compositional systems analogous to the experiments in form by the visual artists in the exhibition, the musical results could prove uniquely mind altering -- or blunting, depending upon your point of view and patience.

That was the point of a fascinating special edition of the Monday Evening Concerts that began in the Anderson Building gallery, with a performance of a John Cage piece for solo violin, and then continued in the Bing Theater with works for two pianos by Steve Reich, Gyorgy Ligeti and Pierre Boulez.

The Cage was an outright experiment in listening and seeing at the same time. His “19’37.998,” an unfinished work, was part of a series of pieces from the mid-’50s that used graphic notation based upon a complex series of rhythmic groupings.

But the point of violinist Johnny Chang’s performance was more curious. A listener could attempt to follow him from place to place in the gallery. But another, more appealing option was to wander aimlessly and hope for serendipity. I found it in front of a Lucio Fontana painting. The artist had made two provocative slices in a pink canvas, and viewing it with the sounds of scraped violin strings in the distance animated the work’s dangerously erotic aspects. Cage had meant something more abstract, but he also meant to represent nature in surprising ways. It certainly did.

For the Bing Theater part of the concert, pianists Karl and Margaret Kohn played three works in which composers made striking use of systems. Reich’s “Piano Phase,” from 1967, is rigorous Minimalism -- one pianist starts a pattern, the second breaks away from it in fraction-of-a-second intervals. In 1976, Ligeti paid homage to that procedure in his “Three Pieces for Two Pianos,” but he went in other directions as well. Here the performers are more insistently dramatic; they come together and they fight.

The second book of Boulez’s “Structures,” written between 1956 and 1961, is far more intricate. It takes as its starting point all kinds of mathematical series but it flowers musically into a vast poetic, pianistic forest of exotic textures and sounds.

At one time all these pieces represented war. Reich, a rebellious young American, specifically reacted against the domination of the Boulez’s European Modernism. In his systematic way, Boulez responded to what he believed to be Cage’s anarchistic conspiracy against their earlier shared way of working. Boulez’s Hungarian cohort Ligeti annoyed his European colleagues by giving the Minimalists credence.

But each composer drew his own straight line and followed it into luxuriant, engrossing sound worlds that not only defied but jubilantly violated geometry. The Kohns, in gripping, virtuosic performances, proved excellent tour guides for a large, cheering audience of geomancers.