A captivating journey through time and space

Four works, all written since 2000, opened this season’s first Green Umbrella concert by the Los Angeles Philharmonic New Music Group on Monday night. Three, exotic of sound and captivating, were by emerging young composers and dealt with time and place, with history.

The fourth, and curiously the most timely, was concerned only with space and place. At 91, Henry Brant is focused on the here and now, and on the hear and now. He is a utopian who has pioneered individuality through spatial music. He believes not in musicians as symphonic sheep playing in unity but rather that each instrument, each voice, should be allowed personal utterance. Many can speak their own minds and be heard at once -- just as long as there is enough distance between them.

This may not be music to solve the problem of overpopulation, given how much square footage a Brant score requires. But as “Tremors” proved in Walt Disney Concert Hall on Monday, it is environmentally friendly music that doesn’t waste space either.

Commissioned by the Getty Research Institute, “Tremors” was created for a boxy hall: the Harold Williams Auditorium at the Getty Center.

Brant separates 16 instrumentalists and four singers, individually or in pairs, onstage and surrounding the audience. At the Getty in June, the result was fun, because the instrumental effects are so wonderfully extravagant, but the Williams is a claustrophobic sound field, and one heard more individual blare than blend.

In Disney, the work opened up sonically. It also had a less aggressive, more likable conductor for its second performance. Monday’s concert was the debut of Alexander Mickelthwate as the Philharmonic’s new assistant conductor, and he proved outstanding, rhythmically alert and an expert exploiter of Brantian splendor. Onstage, timpani and tubas belched through the deepest bass frequencies. Singers on side terraces whooped up a text by Leonardo da Vinci. Piercing trumpets and piccolos and clarinets and chimes made a merry jingle and whistle in high places fore and aft.

You don’t have to be polite, but you must make room for opposing ideas, and we can all get along, Brant’s happy music told its Getty commissioners. Too bad the message doesn’t seem to have resonated more on their Brentwood hilltop.

Getting along was also the theme of Mason Bates’ “Omnivorous Furniture,” which received its premiere Monday. The first work to come out of the Sue Knussen Commission Fund (created in memory of the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s education director to support emerging composers), this is the score of a 27-year-old composer who divides his time between writing new concert music and DJ-ing dance music in clubs. Here he seeks rapport and maybe even a bit of interaction between the two sides of his personality.

“Omnivorous Furniture” is composed for chamber orchestra and drum machine -- or sinfonietta and electronica, as the composer puts it -- and Bates sat in the percussion section and controlled the beats off an Apple laptop. Two new loudspeakers onstage, with three-sided angularly jutting tweeters that evoked ‘50s hi-fi design, were tried out.

The instrumental score has an agreeably punchy rhythmic bounce, interrupted by increasingly lush, sweet-harmonied lyrical sections. The electronica inserts hyped up the forward motion; they were catchy and enhanced the energy, but they were also surprisingly timid. Perhaps the new speakers were designed to understate, or perhaps Bates felt he needed to walk on eggshells to build musical bridges.

The other pieces were Gabriela Lena Frank’s “Leyendas: An Andean Walkabout” for string quartet and Harold Meltzer’s “Virginal” for solo harpsichord and 15 instruments. Like Bates’ new score, both works attempt to combine two distinct cultures or historical periods.

Frank’s is a luminous work that translates Andean folk music to the string quartet medium. Dozens of composers from the world music community have, of course, been inspired by the Kronos Quartet to try something similar. But Frank takes a more classical and musicological approach. She also has a highly refined ear, which results in string writing that is exceptionally smooth and idiomatic yet that in its imitation of panpipes and other indigenous instruments bursts with color and fresh individuality. This is a young composer from Berkeley, born in 1972, who is beginning to make a name for herself, and her quartet, engagingly played by Philharmonic members, proved why.

Meltzer’s “Virginal” was inspired by Elizabethan harpsichord music. In a series of short, variation-like sections with ever-changing instrumentation, it continually attempts to yank the harpsichord out of the past. Sometimes, the colors Meltzer gets are striking, especially the way the mallet instruments sound almost like period flutes and recorders. Even so, there is no disguising the tinkle of the solo, played with flair by Joanne Pearce Martin, and a listener’s ear is never fully freed from history.

Mickelthwate conducted the Bates and Meltzer ensemble pieces just as confidently as he did the Brant, giving the rare impression that one was hearing work already well seasoned.