Music Review

To hear new and different sounds within a formal concert context in downtown Los Angeles, one usually heads under the Green Umbrella, the L.A. Philharmonic’s designated new-music series. Veering a bit further left of conventional within that series is the annual concert by CalArts’ New Century Players, led by David Rosenboom. It’s as if CalArts has a reputation for envelope-pushing to uphold. And it did Tuesday at Zipper Hall.

The best was saved for last, as an ensemble of 28 musicians and singers realized Edgar Varese’s wonderfully raucous swan-song piece from 1961, “Nocturnal,” with a text combining snippets of Anais Nin and the composer’s own gibberish syllables. Left unfinished and assembled by Chou Wen-chung, the piece demands a mighty, sometimes ominous noise, bolstered by percussion and leavened by absurdist harrumphing by its trio of bass singers. Big sculptural hunks of sound are punctuated by silences, hushed invocations and soprano Katherine Terray’s fragmentary lines.

Concept-driven or otherwise scheme-driven works filled out the program, starting with Eric Moe’s taut-yet-restless quartet piece, “riprap,” an insistent pulse coursing beneath scattered, nervous activity. Yuji Takahashi’s texturally compelling “Eksi Stikhia,” for a violin quartet, heeds the “stochastic” method of his teacher, the late Iannis Xenakis. Herbert Brun’s “Gestures for Eleven” is an odd, mixed-use piece of musical real estate, ranging from seemingly random to the neatly organized. Dollops of both Boulez and Stravinsky are tossed into the mix.

A lovely, languid repose came through Michael Pisaro’s “All clocks are clouds”--a world premiere--vaguely suggesting Morton Feldman’s dreamy, time-bending stateliness. The work is like a soft, placid pool of sound, into which understated chords are dropped at irregular intervals. “Irregular intervals,” it turns out, is the operative phrase, rhythmically and harmonically.