California has always attracted cranks, daydreamers, cultists, misfits, and various other types of riffraff from the rest of country. It is something about Manifest Destiny maybe, or perhaps the willful abandonment of family and history to move west, to recreate oneself in the once empty stretches of desert around Los Angeles, or in Sir Francis Drake’s idyllic Nova Albion upstate. Once over the Sierras, or through the Mojave in the south, there is a clear sense of displacement, isolation from the rest of world; there is the feeling that one can never really go back to where one came from, at least unchanged, even in this wired and buoyant age.

Music is no exception. What has given America its most distinctive musical art is just this sense of displacement from the currents on the other coast, and by extension Europe: the experimentalism of Cage, Harrison, Cowell, and Partch, the free jazz of Coleman, the minimalism of Young, Riley, and Reich, the “teenage symphonies” of Spector and Wilson. All give the impression of their impossibility in places freighted with Kultur. It’s easy to be free of history when no one has bothered to write it. And even if they had, I’m not convinced anyone would care; after decades of celluloid and hippies, it has become the wonder-at-nothing state.

It is something of this freedom and strangeness that the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s West Coast, Left Coast series is trying to capture. The 16^th season of Piano Spheres, a program devoted to bringing relatively modern piano music to Los Angeles, was naturally included as part of the larger series. It was an odd recital that reflected some of the musical diversity of the place: a few works of the quintessential California composer Henry Cowell, Cage done on toy pianos, an elegant piece by Mel Powell, a Rhodes piano composition by William Kraft, and the strikingly varied work of composers Jarvinen, Lesemann, Naidoo, and Lentz.

The standouts, for better or worse, were Kraft’s enigmatic Requiescat (Let the bells mourn for us for we are remiss), Naidoo’s appropriately titled Bad Times Coming, and Lentz’s NightBreaker. Kraft’s work, played with a marked intensity by Gloria Cheng, showed the 70s avant-garde preference for deriving an endless array of sounds from a single instrument; Cheng played the inside of the piano with mallets, the amplifier was struck to disturb the reverb coil (a horrendous noise, but effective), and the Rhodes tremolo was treated as a compositional element rather than as bland wallpaper to cover the sound. Kraft has a way with well-placed sonorities.

Naidoo’s Bad Time Coming, performed with alacrity by Vicki Ray, was a well-crafted pastiche of awful music, including obvious pandering using 90s electronica-style “beats” – something music like this always seems to call for. Postmodern, loathsome word, one evoking militant political correctness, dated unreadable lit., and questionable artistic juxtapositions, is relevant here. The worst of contemporary music appropriates popular styles in this kind of artless fashion. However, it seemed to please most of the audience; one enthused baby boomer was frugging in his seat next to me.

The last performance of the night, Lentz’s four piano NightBreaker was a surprising and pretty work. It consisted of mostly florid tonal passages lightly threaded together. To quote Robert Ashley, it had “the feeling of the idea of silk scarves in the air.” Mark Robson and Susan Svrcek joined Ray and Cheng.

The Steve Allen Theater in Hollywood has a surrealistic appeal about it. It houses the Center for Inquiry, a haven for skeptics and rationalists in an otherwise fantasist city.  It suits the place, however; Arthur Conan Doyle’s beautifully hand-written investigations into séances line the walls, as do some of Houdini’s writings, and names such as Baruch Spinoza and Giordano Bruno (mystics surely) are trumpeted as important precursors of people like Steve Allen among others. The latter’s bust, something I never expected to see in this life, adorns the otherwise well-appointed theater. It is also the venue for ResBox, an experimental music showcase curated by Hans Fjellestad.

Yann Novak’s music, or sound art as the composer calls it, was presented first. It had something of the theater’s ambivalence or surreality, though, not in the sense of lacking conviction, or assurance, or even a pronounced aesthetic – Novak has clear musical designs, and a sensitive ear – but the sounds had a metaphysical quality, an otherworldliness to them. One never felt that they could be the result of rubbing, striking, plucking, blowing, or any of the various ways sound in this veil-of-tears world we live in is made.  Paul Lanksy, noted composer and theorist, once described this style as “outer-space” music. Because the listener can’t ground it to the their own physical experience of sound, it becomes something else: psychodrama, the music of alien worlds, and so on.  Louis and Bebe Barron made their careers scoring 50s sci-fi movies with these “electronic tonalities.” The association is inescapable.

That said, the music was lovely. He played slowly evolving granulated frequencies, often filtered to create an almost sine-wave purity to the timbre.  Dissonant tones beat over clouds of gently modulated noise. Sometimes the interval of a fifth, or a cluster of pitches in a key, would break like light above the abyss of static. The music changed continuously, seamlessly moving from texture to texture. If it had any point of departure, it was likely Kim Cascone’s work in the late 90s like Blue Cube [ ], or Cathode Flower.

The second artist, Steve Roden, played lap steel guitar and manipulated a variety of effects units and samples, different from Novak’s laptop derived sounds.  It reminded me more of Mike Kelley’s “pathetic” art than any music I can think of. Whereas Mike Kelley deals with everyday kitsch items such as stuffed animals and plastic baubles – one memorable work is a single dirty cat dish lying on the floor – Roden works with unwanted sounds.  He looped nasal singing, slightly out of tune lap steel chords, amplifier hum, and little glitches etc. The music had no form, just one texture followed by another, none of them particularly prepossessing. It was amateurish, or calculated to seem so; sounds awkwardly faded in and out, and there was no sense of direction to what I am assuming was an improvised piece. The performance was novel, and there was a kind of pathos to it. Roden patiently gathered together all of the sounds that nobody else wanted, like a team in which all of the members were picked last.

Ensemble Green’s Thursday concert at the Ruskin Art Club presented what I would call an American Gebrauchsmusik, the latest model of Hindemith’s “music for use” begun in 1920s Germany. Like Hindemith’s music, it is above all things a functional art, solid, written with respect for the composer’s craft and the agility of the performers. In its American version, it can most easily be described as ambivalent: not quite tonal or atonal, rhythmic, but not often memorably so, not exclusively melodic or textural, surprisingly current or dated. The use of unusual techniques, such as multiphonics or flutter-tongue, frequently seems calculated to assert modernity rather than for any musical effect. It is yielding to the public, yet pleases no one.

It is also the music of awards and institutional support, its devotees, academics.  Six of the 8 composers presented have their Ph.D. in music, a testament to the years, even decades, of training required to produce such work. It is music for an audience that demands composers’ degrees, awards, and current academic jobs to be listed in the program notes. The aim of the art is quantifiable skill; it pleads for respect.

Filament, a short piece for glasses and flute by Paul David Thomas, was one of the more direct works on the program.  It had an appealing austerity for such a fey duo, largely because of the dedicated reading by Ensemble Green’s flutist Julie Long and percussionist Andrea Moore. The flute and rubbed glass blended well; the bright ringing of the glass sounded like flute ambience when they played unisons, a ghostly effect that suggests the work was more about tone-color than melody.  Its limited gamut of notes gave the work clarity and an attractive simplicity – something of the original spirit of Hindemith’s Gebrauchsmusik.

Shadowings, by Matthew Schreibeis, was one of two works on the program that were explicitly about ghosts (the other was Piotr Szewczyck’s Apparitions).  The composer was inspired by the myth-based stories of Lafcadio Hearn set in turn of the century Japan. (In the program notes, Schriebeis mentions a demon and a man-eating goblin called a jikininki.) The composer interpreted Hearn’s “shadowings” musically: slow glissandi in the strings hovered around sustained pitches in the woodwinds, trembling thirds in the flute and clarinet were underscored by raspy bowing, Debussian whole-tone passages implied the uncanny. It was an evocative piece; Schreibeis has a talent for allusive writing.

Christopher Gainey’s Iago for solo violin was the night’s most virtuosic display piece, with lots of strident harmonies written in a mostly Romantic fashion, fast chromatic passages, dissonant arpeggios etc.  It was Gainey’s take on Iago’s villainy in Othello, with echoes of the diabolus in musica, both the interval of a tritone and Niccolò Paganini’s rumored pact with the devil.  Iago is cliché, but it was deftly played by Elizabeth Hedman.

Somewhere in Bern, Idaho there is a humming step down transformer that changed the course of American classical music. The humming sound is called “lamination rattle” among the electrically inclined – a 60-cycle buzz that in some cases sounds like a particularly insistent Tuvan throat singing. The story goes that La Monte Young, enfant terrible of the 60’s musical avant-garde, was entranced by the sound as a boy, and by the time he reached his mid-20s, his interest in the plaintive drone led to a series of pieces that are some of the most reductive musical art ever composed. Composition 1960 #7 is the notes B and F# held “for a very long time.” The complete score of Composition 1960 #10 is “Draw a straight line and follow it.” The Second Dream of the High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer (1962) consists of 4 oddly tuned notes played literally in imitation of Young’s early memories in Bern and Montpelier:

“There are two examples of sounds of electrical power transformers that I remember listening to during the first four and a half years of my life. One was a telephone pole on the Bern road (there’s only one road in Bern, Idaho; it is gravel)… I used to stand next to this pole and listen to the sound. The other electrical sound was produced by a small power distribution station just outside of Montpelier next to a Conoco gas depot that my grandfather managed… Sometimes on warm days I would climb up on top of the huge gasoline storage tanks and sit in the hot sun, smelling the gasoline fumes, listening to the sounds, daydreaming and looking off at the mountains.”

What was important about La Monte Young’s work in the early 60s is that it necessarily changed the focal distance of the listener; sounds that were normally passed over as irrelevant, or heard only in the context of a musical pattern became important in themselves: the surface details of timbre, overtones, beating, and tuning discrepancies. The subjective experience of time was also changed in a way that belies easy description, and seems dependent on this apparent lack of musical change. The aesthetics of La Monte Young became a blank slate to American composers, a chance to start over and break from the overwrought and needlessly complex European tradition then in vogue. Philip Corner, Harold Budd, and Charlemagne Palestine were early adopters of the new “minimalist” style, as were the now more well-known Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and Philip Glass. (The latter three composers developed it into what could more accurately be called “repetitive” music.) Although La Monte Young is rarely heard in concert or in recordings – everything is out of print and difficult to find – his influence is everywhere.

David Kant, whose work formed the first half of the concert at The Wulf in downtown Los Angeles, is clearly inspired by this early 60s minimalism. The first piece performed, Variations for Functions and Partitions of Time, Variation VIII,was simply 2 different notes sampled from a piano and reiterated by a laptop for 10 minutes or so. The laptop repeated the piano tones steadily, beginning at different points in the sample so that there were subtle variations in the timbre of the pitch. The second work was Harmony #, which consisted of an ensemble playing different notes together, i.e., a “harmony,” for some length of time, followed by a Fluxus-like performance where, one by one, the performers went up to the music stand and notated what I believe is the chord for the next ensemble to play. During the latter half of Harmony #, the audience waited patiently in silence for some sound to come out of the ensemble of piano, guitar, harmonium, and sax. The work was funny, assuming you can laugh at your own frustrated expectations. It was a kind of mercenary take on Cage’s 4’33’’ – same thing minus the Zen, and something got written.

Casey Thomas Anderson’s Snow was a more tuneful work for an ensemble of radios, female voice, viola, guitar, bass, trombone, and sax. A single pitch acted as a formal marker between mostly tonal ensemble playing; a dissonant chord or interval would evolve slowly out of the single pitch into pretty tonal meanderings and back. Mistuned radio sounds were a kind of white noise background and seemingly alien transmissions interspersed between minimalist esoterica. The work had a pleasing shape, though the performance itself felt unsure, as entrances and exits of the performers often seemed tentative. It could have used a few more rehearsals.

For most audiences these works are pretentious fraud. The music will be seen as unintentional satire, the excesses of an aesthetically bankrupt art scene claiming some kind of transcendent value for a few sounds bordered by silence. And that’s a fair point of view. But I would suggest it is much simpler than that. It is the pleasure of listening to the often-missed details of music, played quietly in a loft off of 7^th among mostly sympathetic listeners. The Wulf is excellent.

At some point in 40s America, improvisation was beatified, and Charlie Parker became something of a patron saint to the new bohemians. In Jack Kerouac’s words, he was a Buddha-like figure proclaiming “…All Is Well” in brittle notes coming out of a plastic saxophone (e.g., Jazz at Massey Hall). It wasn’t simply Parker’s novel bop sound that mattered, but Parker himself as an emblem for free expression, a musician that somehow transcended the materials of his art through a heady mix of heroin, technique, and divinity. Parker’s art was unfixed, existing only from moment to moment, so in a sense Charlie Parker was the music. In the lofts of Manhattan and California, this seemingly “free” process of making art came to be seen as more essential, and in many ways even more meaningful, than the art produced. To “Action” painters such as Jackson Pollock, dripping paint on a canvas was reception from the subconscious; for composer John Cage, flipping coins was an imitation of the workings of Nature; “Beat Generation” writers Alan Ginsberg and Kerouac thought stream-of-consciousness poetry a kind of Zen satori. To the avant-garde of the 40s and 50s, improvisation was a way to go beyond the (lowercase) self.

In music, improvisation never went away, but it changed. Out of bop, Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, and Albert Ayler developed “free jazz,” abandoning the usual chords and melodies for something more abstract and intuitive; Karheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Boulez, and Cornelius Cardew followed Cage in modern classical music, in some instances creating scores consisting only of drawings or poetry for the performers to interpret. Today there is no clear division between the styles; improvised music is simply free.

Last Sunday’s show at the Center for Arts in Eagle Rock showcased some of the West Coast’s more accomplished free players. Two trios performed, the first something of a beat revival complete with spoken word (Ginsberg was name-dropped). Trombonist Michael Vlatkovich and percussionist Rich West alternated their particular brand of freely improvised music with aphoristic and witty lines by poet Dorothea (Dottie) Grossman, the funniest perhaps referring to Catskills comedian Henny Youngman. The music was more enigmatic, connecting less with the poetry than one would expect. Vlatkovich played various mutes as percussion, short bluesy lines using only the slide of the instrument, and reassembled the trombone in different configurations during the set to get a wide variety of sounds. West, the percussionist had an array of toys, chimes, and exotic percussion that he played along with his standard drum kit.  Frequently trading off with Vlatkovich between Grossman’s readings, his playing seemed calculated to have more contrasting moments throughout.

The second trio, consisting of Ross Hammond on guitar, Vinny Golia on woodwinds, and Alex Cline on drums, was perhaps a more usual take on the improvisational music scene.  At moments their set was almost oracular, an effect surprisingly not uncommon among adept free players.  A few notes played by Hammond would be taken up by Golia and Cline almost instantaneously and developed, which would in turn influence Hammond’s playing.  There were genuinely beautiful moments too; Hammond would loop haloes of ambient guitar sound while Golia played with a floating lyricism on the soprano sax, both supported by more understated playing from Cline.  Styles would change fluidly, hermetic free jazz turning into rock into noise etc.  However, like all free improvisation, not every moment was inspired or even listenable.  Transitions in the style can be a kind of fascinating seeking, or a wall of noise depending on the players and the day.  On Sunday, Hammond, Golia, and Cline had both.