Visible made aural: It strikes a chord

With its current show, “Visual Music,” the Museum of Contemporary Art has opened a can of worms. Worms being worms, they don’t travel fast or far, but Tuesday night a few had wriggled through the cracks of the Colburn School next door, where in Zipper Concert Hall pianist Vicki Ray played -- dazzlingly -- new, recent and not-so-recent pieces inspired by visual art.

Visual music is a confusing concept. Maybe a physical gesture on canvas will suggest a course of compositional action, as when Nicola Sani takes a cue from the painter Lucio Fontana in “Concetto Spaziale, Attese” (Spatial Concept, Expectations) for piano and tape. Electronics drone on. The piano dramatically interrupts. An aural knife slashes a sonic canvas.

Ray’s program, for her annual Piano Spheres appearance, began with the Sani and several other short works from the 1980s and ‘90s that play around with the idea of paint. Louis Andriessen’s “Image de Moreau” turns repetitive Minimalist figures into Romantic tremolos in loving tribute to the sensual 19th century French painter Gustave Moreau. John Zorn’s “dead ringer” is a zany collage coming out of a love for classic animated cartoons. Toshi Ichiyanagi in “Imaginary Scenes” and Kevin Volans in “Notes d’un Peintre” imagine themselves visual artists toying with pigments and shapes -- their scores are fluid, pianistically luxuriant, pleasing.

But it took the premiere of an ambitious, entrancing piece by David Rosenboom, “Twilight Language,” to best demonstrate how mysterious all this eye/ear business really is. I have no idea what Rosenboom is up to in this piece. It connects with Tibetan Buddhism (“The Simultaneous Absence of Silence and Sound” is the title of one of its four parts). It alludes to a 10th century style of Chinese Zen painting known as “i” (“wildly free gestures so refined as to inexorably convey fundamental forms of nature,” the composer writes).

Musically, however, “Twilight Language” is a stunning exploration of the pianistic language. Rosenboom is best known as an improviser who sometimes takes a while to get going, but once he does he draws alluring, even transcendent, washes of sound from the piano. Here there was no wait. Right from the start, Ray produced an aura of awe, hitting a gong to set the mood, rippling across the keyboard to take listeners into another world and producing all manner of wondrous effects. A marvelous percussive dance-like section was played while the strings of the piano were damped. Ravishing waves of otherworldly harmonics sounded like Debussy in the clouds. The piece lasted 15 minutes and, in the very best, time-stopping sense, seemed much longer. Ray’s performance was mind-bending.

Ray also included a nod to the French and their tradition of mixing tone and tint. Andre Jolivet’s “Pegase,” from 1947, is musical sculpture, the sound of a mythical horse rearing its head. Poulenc’s 1957 song cycle “Le Travail du Peintre” comments on Picasso, Chagall, Klee, Miro and others of the MOCA crowd from odd angles. The composer sweetens Paul Eluard’s tart texts, which guest tenor Jonathan Mack sang forthrightly, but is elusive in other ways.

There is no paint on Poulenc’s notes. His are portraits of painters -- never deep, though telling and true. Artists and musicians often look over one another’s shoulders, but every now and then they also dare look into one another’s eyes.