Review: To introduce a newly discovered John Cage work, CalArts makes much of ‘Minimalism means’

Little about Minimalism in music is and never has been minimal. Unlike seemingly related reductive approaches to visual art and literature, music’s Minimalism has proven deceptively all-inclusive, its supposed simple means opening a huge world of possibilities, analogous in a way to Einstein having come up with a pithy equation to describe the all-encompassing effects of gravity in his general theory of relativity.

Still, it might seem a stretch to chose, as the Ensemble at CalArts did Thursday night at REDCAT, a program called “Minimalist means” in which to spring the news of a recently discovered small score by John Cage. But in a convoluted way — and Minimalism is, if nothing else, convoluted — it wasn’t.

The program of works from the last 45 years, many of them locally sourced, was meant to show some of the sides of Minimalism we don’t normally associate with the style. There was, for instance, little evidence of the use of pulse and familiar harmonic cadences that made stars of Philip Glass and Steve Reich.

The key figure here was James Tenney, the composer long associated with CalArts up to his death in 2006. Tenney could never be pinned down. He worked conceptually, poetically (including with Zen koans) and with complex acoustical phenomena. He was a mighty virtuoso pianist who played with Glass and Reich in their early years while at the same time knocking out complex Ives scores on the keyboard. Among his admirers was Cage.

Here’s what appears to have happened. Cage must have visited Tenney in 1978 when he premiered “Harmonium 5,” an acoustically rich canon for three string instruments. At some point, Cage wrote on the pencil manuscript of the score a single bar of Satie-esque chords and the note: “all sides of the small stone for Erik Satie and (secretly given to Jim Tenney as a koan).” It is signed John, and the handwriting is definitely Cage’s.

The secret seems to have gone to the graves of both composers. Tenney no doubt never saw it, having already produced a final ink copy of the piece. The Cage koan was discovered only last year when the Mexican new music ensemble Liminar was in L.A. to give a concert at REDCAT and happened to spend some time looking through Tenney manuscripts at the home of the composer’s widow.

There is no indication of what to do with this musical koan. What the CalArts Ensemble did was place it among a 75-minute unbroken series of Tenney works that constituted the second half a marathon program. The ensemble pieces — Tenney’s “Harmonium 6,” “Spectrum 5,” “(night) [… for Harold Budd]” and “Form 4 (In Memoriam Morton Feldman)” — were connected by a harp solo, “August Harp,” of a four-note motif, with the pitches sometimes altered, slowly repeated.

It is stunning music. You think you know what you are hearing, but you keep finding out that you don’t, again not unlike relativity, in which we find out that time doesn’t work the way we think we perceive it. In “Harmonium 6,” a small group of winds, brass and strings (with added electrics) simply intones pitches from the overtone series. Different instrumental colors become strange goings-on capable of stirring the imagination.

For the Cage premiere, an ensemble of two flutes, three trumpets, three basses, piano and vibraphone may have tried to make too much of too few notes. Riffing on Satie, they produced a jazzy gymnopédie. The koan will not nudge Cage scholarship forward in any significant degree, but if any musicologist is interested in exploring Cage and generosity of spirit, this is a handy new morsel.

The first half of the program was Minimalism of the mostly meditative variety but still all over the place. It began with Michael Fink’s beautiful “As is thought/Aurora” for bass clarinet, vibes and harp blending in a heavenly slow procession. Moody drones were common in two new pieces, Jordan Dykstra’s “Fathom Peaks Unseen” and Danny Clarke’s “Synapse.” Jo Kondo’s “Yokohama” proved less stable, with piano puncturing the stately sustaining sounds of a pair of violins and bass flute.

Frederic Rzewski’s anarchic “Chains” was the musically and dramatically aggressive outlier. It included a versatile violinist, Rachel Iba, metrically reading the news (good and bad), cellphones noises, stones rhythmically thrown on the ground and coins startlingly set in motion on the skin of a drum. But there were repeated patterns, so it too is Minimalism.