A composer in search of America

The first thing we see after the lights darken for Mikel Rouse’s “Music for Minorities” is a CNN newscast splintered into stuttering repetitions. Under a stammering Wolf Blitzer, a news scroll announces, “God calls it quits.” He can’t compete with humanity.

“I made my own religion,” Rouse then sings in a sweet tune eerily familiar (and eerily hard to place), “and that’s my universe.”

Calm, cool, collected, Rouse spends the next hour sitting on the stage of UCLA’s Macgowan Little Theater singing smooth songs inspired by ‘60s pop and Delta blues. His tools are acoustic guitar (softly amplified), harmonica and video deck. On a screen overhead are projected fractured scenes from life -- interviews with people in rural Louisiana, clips of Rouse’s New York surroundings.

The life is messy. The songs are not. They attempt to connect the dots, as stories of others merge into Rouse’s own stories.

The dots can’t, of course, be connected. We are all minorities, at least to ourselves, and we can make only partial sense of our stories.

Rouse comes out of a school of composers in New York once known as Totalists. As a term, Totalism didn’t stick. But the idea -- that for the post-Minimalist generation, it might not be a bad thing to let lots of things into music -- did.

Totalism gave Rouse permission to write in a sophisticated pop style. The conventional tunes of “Music for Minorities” don’t have conventional structures or settings (a drone-like electronic amalgam of overlaid guitars and percussion accompanies them). Counterpoint and asymmetry sneak in. Under the gentle surface of the music are disturbing ripples. You think you know where you are, but you don’t.

The result is a modest detour from a trilogy of operas that Rouse has been creating. Like “Dennis Cleveland” (a TV talk show opera) and “Failing Kansas” (based on Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood”), his new piece, which is being presented by UCLA Live and runs through Sunday, finds fascination in many of the troubled, darker aspects of Middle America. It finds, in fact, more than fascination. It finds a curious solace and even salvation in stripping away the veneer of ordinary life and discovering a profound individuality.

If everyone is a minority, if we are all a religion unto ourselves, sacred ground is slippery. Rouse’s worlds are mixed. “Music for Minorities” was made while he served a composer residency in Louisiana. But he also had a life in New York. The images above him show both worlds. His wife, Lisa Boudreau, is a member of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, and she prances amusingly while Rouse, amusingly, sings of “rubber feet.”

Cunningham tells a funny story. Fact and fiction merge. On split screens, sad and moving stories are told.

In one clip, a hick, played by Rouse, sits on his porch and carries on about a “love field.” A Japanese cowboy has his say, although who knows what it is he’s saying.

It doesn’t all add up, and it isn’t meant to. Perhaps what impresses most about “Music for Minorities” is the quiet, understated insight that nobody knows what experiences really mean. For biographers and Hollywood screenwriters, life may be a linear narrative. Journalists love to pick up the pieces and tell a story. On radio, “This American Life” is a frequently sentimental attempt at making sense out of broken lives.

Rouse, on the other hand, takes cliches and dangles them in front of us without ever letting them settle into sentiment. The overworked harmonies in his songs don’t gel. Stories come in fragments. Two voices speak at once, and you decide what to listen to. Lyrics are elusive comments, more general than specific. Rouse rarely raises his voice. A sense of humor, as slippery as everything else in his work, runs through “Music for Minorities.” Parody and tragedy aren’t far apart.

“Music for Minorities” is deceptively simple and straightforward Americana. You take from it as much or as little as you want. No one can really say what it is to be an American these days. But this is a meaningful piece of the puzzle.

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‘Music for Minorities’

Where: Macgowan Little Theater, UCLA

When: 8 p.m. today and Saturday, 7 p.m. Sunday

Price: $35

Contact: (310) 825-2101 or www.UCLALive.org