MUSIC REVIEWS : Challenging Fare From EAR Unit

Technically adroit, patently adventurous and disparately attired, the California EAR Unit gave a provocative and largely serious-minded concert Wednesday at the L.A. County Museum of Art. The eight-member group’s sartorial scheme went from concert dark to varicolored garb, to percussionist Arthur Jarvinen’s authentic Chinese ensemble--suiting the Asian flavor of his knotty and engaging opening piece, “The Vulture’s Garden.”

But then, the contemporary music group has always had a dogmatic aversion to convention. Here, the most conventional--or at least established--composer on the program was Morton Feldman (1926-87), hardly a household name. The reputation of this compelling composer, who penned some of the most deceptively placid music ever written, has gradually grown since his death.

Feldman’s 1973 work, “For Frank Ohara” was, expectedly, the most potent piece on this program. Beneath those eerie still waters and elastic time considerations lies a strong and subtle probity, a search for a music that lives in and for the moment. This music, with its funereal cadence, quiet but clenched chords, floated flute tones and softly rumbling timpani, is a dark delicacy. An exacting ensemble fully realized the work’s power both to soothe and to haunt.

In a related but separate way, Stephen L. Mosko’s “Psychotropes”--in its world premiere--also deals with time and space. Like much of Mosko’s music, the new work is less about musical systems or “isms” than it is about surging and converging waves of energy. His pieces are like machines that create their own behavioral patterns and sonic byproducts.

Pablo Ortiz’s “El Agua Incierta” and Julio Martin Viera’s “Match III” followed more academic lines of post-serial compositional thought. Riad Abdel-Gawad’s “Raasa bal Kamangan,” a duet played by violinist Robin Lorentz and cellist Erika Duke-Kirkpatrick, is an enticing, exotic mesh of percussive pulsations and--by Western standards--microtonal digressions.

All in a night’s work for this challenge-hungry Unit.