At Heritage Hall on Sunday, January 24. Copresented by Music on Main and the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival. No remaining performances

One of the reasons minimalist music is so often considered an indulgence of the pretentious is that some of it can only be appreciated if you understand the theory behind it. This is the case with Four Organs, a Steve Reich work performed by Brooklyn quartet So Percussion in its two-night Vancouver debut. With local guest Vern Griffiths providing metronomic accompaniment with a pair of maracas, each of the group’s four members—Eric Beach, Josh Quillen, Adam Sliwinski, and Jason Treuting—held down various notes on his keyboard, with the duration of those notes increasing as the piece went on. Four Organs has no melodic content to speak of, just overlapping tones that form a dominant 11th chord. To put that in layman’s terms, it’s a shifting drone with dissonant intervals that can be downright piercing. No wonder early performances of the 1970 composition were met with loud boos and near riots.

The Heritage Hall audience on Sunday night was much more appreciative of what was probably the program’s most challenging music. The other works performed were no less formal exercises than Four Organs is, but they were arguably more crowd-pleasing. Reich’s Clapping Music, Nagoya Marimbas, and Music for Pieces of Wood are similar in that each features rhythmic patterns played on two or more instruments, with the parts moving out of phase with one another by one or more beats. So Percussion handled each mathematically complex piece with jaw-dropping precision.

Nagoya Marimbas proved particularly virtuosic, with Sliwinski and Treuting spinning out melodic lines that, because they were constantly in motion, created a hypnotic effect.

Griffiths again joined the quartet for Music for Pieces of Wood: as all five hammered out a beat on tuned wooden blocks, the room sounded like a telegraph office with five machines tapping out the same Morse code message out of sync with each other. The rhythmic complexity was brain-twisting, but the performance was flawless.

So Percussion followed that up with two parts of David Lang’s the so-called laws of nature, which the group commissioned in 2002. This was almost the exact opposite of the Reich works, in that it often had the performers playing in unison but on subtly different instruments—these included tuned steel rods, tom-toms, and kick drums in the thunderous, almost industrial first portion, and flowerpots and teacups in the quieter second. It was a tad repetitive, but the quirky voicing made it fun.

Not as much fun, though, as the encore, in which the quartet led an audience-participation version of Clapping Music. This might have been the highlight of the show, because you don’t need any fancy music theory to enjoy putting your hands together.