At Black Mountain College in the 1950s, John Cage and Merce Cunningham traded big ideas about the future of art with Robert Rauschenberg, Charles Olson and Franz Kline. Composers learnt from visual artists, who were learning from poets, and never had the arts felt so genuinely plastic and malleable and fresh.

But any suggestion that Wave Movements, a collaboration between the composers Richard Reed Parry and Bryce Dessner and the photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto – performed by the Britten Sinfonia under Clark Rundell as part of the final concert of the Barbican’s Mountains and Waves weekend – would be infused with the true spirit of Black Mountain College proved false. This was revolution only in the Russell Brand-trademarked meaning of the word.

Stretching over 60 minutes, Reed Parry and Dessner fed the Britten Sinfonia with colourless harmonic gruel. Drab sequences of primary colour string chords underpinned with timpani ambled towards a climactic folk song articulated soulfully by Steeleye Span’s Maddy Prior, who merited more than a cameo.

Meantime, Sugimoto’s single image of sea against horizon got lighter and it got darker – but without any meaningful interface between music and image. Such conceptually facile composition was never likely to generate the promised immersive sonic seascape.

Post-interval, Steve Reich’s Drumming was performed by the New York-based So Percussion quartet, with guests from new music groups Eighth Blackbird and Yarn/Wire, and classical minimalism’s core message was reasserted. Serial composers compressed time, but minimalist composition was about heightening awareness of the expanding moment – big, spacious canvases knitted together from diminutive melodic and rhythmic cells phasing, interlocking, regrouping. Daisy Press and Beth Meyer’s vocal parts were, alas, obliterated by the thudding momentum of marimbas, glockenspiels and pitched bongo drums. But in the context of what preceded it, though, the 40-year-old Drumming sounded stark, brutal and urgent.