In this universe, time bends back on itself

Every art form has its notion of historical time. For TV watchers, a fuzzy black-and-white episode of “You Bet Your Life” along with commercials for a 1956 DeSoto looks very old indeed. Yet museum-goers take it in stride when a 2,500-year-old artifact from China is displayed in the same building with something new from Damien Hirst. Then there are teenagers who complain that a blockbuster movie that opened the previous weekend is already ancient history.

Sunday night at Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Los Angeles Master Chorale covered pretty much what we consider the historical range of music. It began with Perotin and ended with Arvo Part, a program spanning eight centuries. And its most interesting feature, besides reminding us of the timeless beauty of Part’s 1992 “Te Deum,” was to highlight what unreliable historians our ears can be.

Perotin’s “Viderunt Omnes,” which exhibits the stirring of the contrapuntal urge in late 12th and early 13th century music, can seem as fresh as the peaches just showing up at farmers markets. Palestrina, whose “Pope Marcellus” Mass followed Perotin on Sunday and represented the latest harmonic thing in the mid-16th century, can now sound staid practically beyond endurance. The Estonian Part, a Postmodern combiner of Perotin, Palestrina and John Cage, seems almost to transcend history. His “Te Deum” is ultimately very old-sounding in a very contemporary way.

“Viderunt Omnes” is the earliest Western music we know of that was written in four parts, but it was on the program for modern reasons. The Minimalist composer Steve Reich loves this kind of thing, in which three upper voices sing a spirited dance above a chant tune in the bass slowed down to a snail’s pace. And Sunday’s concert was to have been the occasion for a Reich premiere commissioned by the Master Chorale in celebration of its first season in Disney. But composers have their own time frames. Like Magnus Lindberg, who missed his deadline for a Philharmonic premiere over the weekend, Reich works slowly; his work has been moved to October.

For “Viderunt Omnes,” conductor Grant Gershon joined two other tenors (Pablo Cora and George Sterne) to sing those dancing upper lines while 13 basses intoned the chant. The performance was fluid, with voices blending seamlessly. But again history played its tricks on the ear. Perhaps this is how the piece should sound, but when the modern interest in Perotin began in the 1960s, his music was sung more aggressively, almost as if it were proto-pop. Such a recording of it was even played at the Fillmore in San Francisco to warm up the audience before Janis Joplin came onstage.

By comparison with Perotin, Palestrina produced a kind of polyphonic Prozac. He modernized church music by blending harmonies into a soupy sound that, at least by today’s conventions, becomes altogether unthreatening. For the “Marcellus” Mass, Gershon arranged members of the Master Chorale in a circle along the perimeter of the Disney stage and conducted from the center. Again the blend made a very pretty sound, true to Palestrina but one-dimensional nonetheless.

Part’s “Te Deum” might be thought of as flat-sounding on the surface as well. But he offers different surfaces that don’t so much interact as intersect, producing striking effects. Here a small chorus of men moved up into the terrace seats on one side of the stage, opposite a chorus of women on the other. Onstage were a mixed chorus and a string orchestra. Two members of the California EAR Unit (pianist Vicki Ray and percussionist Amy Knoles) contributed occasional sounds from a Cagian prepared piano and a recorded wind harp that suddenly added a deep resonance to the otherwise sleek vocal and string textures.

There is in this score a stillness that we associate with timelessness. But unlike Palestrina with his clotted harmonies or Perotin with his eager counterpoint, Part has mastered the technique of floating. It’s a late-20th century conjuring trick. One listens as if suspended. I can’t explain how it works, but at the end of a splendid, transcendent performance, the audience didn’t so much leap to its feet as levitate.