Composers show off innovative edge

The musicians of the California EAR Unit have a long history, but they continue to push onward. So do the two composers who filled their bill Monday night at LACMA’s Bing Theater, Morton Subotnick and Paul Dresher. Each has produced a rich legacy of work and doesn’t look to be through yet.

First heard in 2003 in Santa Fe, N.M., and soon after on two occasions in the Southland, Subotnick’s “Release” feels like a retrospective at first. Several aspects of the composer’s strong personality are at play: the prominent use of a clarinet (his old instrument), the revival of his spectacular staccato electronics of the 1960s and ‘70s darting among six loudspeakers, the aggressive, single-note ostinatos for acoustic instruments. Even the piece’s name sounds like a response to an earlier, famous Subotnick title, “Touch.”

Midway through, though, you begin to sense Subotnick’s reference to Messiaen’s 1941 “Quartet for the End of Time” as an inspiration. Brooding introspection has often crept into Subotnick’s music, but here he transforms that quality into a state of meditative serenity, with acoustic instruments drifting like a spaceship through a belt of shooting electronic asteroids. At the end, the work comes down to a solo violin -- alone, desolate. If this was a farewell -- and I wouldn’t bet on it, given Subotnick’s still-restless urge to innovate -- it was a lovely, eloquent one.

Dresher, meanwhile, continues to explore the idiom of the monodrama in a nearly hourlong piece with the provocative title “The Tyrant” (2005). Here, Dresher and librettist Jim Lewis have a solo vocalist -- the estimable, darkening tenor of Jonathan Mack -- speak and sing to a king whose paranoia about his security makes him afraid to physically leave his throne (Stalin comes to mind).

One is reminded of Dresher’s monodrama of two decades past, “Slow Fire,” but his musical resources are now more sophisticated. Intricately orchestrated, with one fascinating sequence for clockwork percussion patterns, the score ranges comfortably from lyrical compassion to dissonant backgrounds and an outbreak of free jazz. Some of the words were difficult to make out, but Dresher’s dramatic instincts and the contemporary implications of the text were more than enough to keep listeners focused.