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Music Review | American Composers Alliance Summer Music Festival

Recent Works With a Smattering of Jazz and a Pinch of Presidential Politics

Ever since Aaron Copland helped start the American Composers Alliance in 1937, it has done the serious and necessary work of publishing new music and maintaining a large archive of American works, with scores going back decades before it was founded. Much of its work these days is behind the scenes, but since 2000 it has raised its flag over a modest annual festival devoted largely to recent works.

The 2009 installment had a promising start on Wednesday evening at the Leonard Nimoy Thalia at Symphony Space. Seven composers were represented, and if their works shared certain characteristics — rhythmic complication, post-tonal harmonies and an aversion to Minimalist techniques — each score embraced less severe influences as well.

Frederick Tilles’s “Song for Sister Hokkaido” (2008), which opened the concert, edges toward modernist complexity slowly, by way of jazz. Scored for brass quintet and percussion (heavy on the congas), the piece begins in a style that could easily pass for swing but drifts toward Latin rhythms and cinematic flourishes. The performance, by Second Instrumental Unit, was polished and tightly unified but also matter-of-fact: you wanted to hear this vital, varied material played with a hotter edge.

Travis Alford also borrowed from jazz, mainly because his “Transitions” (2007) is a memorial to a music teacher who was a jazz buff. Mr. Alford captures that passion in a moody trumpet line, nestled within more angular flute and piano writing.

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Madalyn Parnas, left, and Cicely Parnas at Symphony Space.Credit...Hiroyuki Ito for The New York Times

Where jazz is the driving force of Mr. Tilles’s work, Mr. Alford uses it as a strand within a light-textured mixture of contemporary accents, and his work’s spirit is in the graceful way jazz and a mild modernist thorniness move in and out of focus.

Brian Fennelly’s “ ‘Sigol’ for Two” (2008), a violin and cello fantasy, tilts decisively toward neo-Romanticism, and in fact its passing glimpses of modernist acerbity sound more nostalgic than the arching melodies and playfully scampering figures that animate the score. The Duo Parnas (Madalyn Parnas, violinist, and her sister, Cicely Parnas, cellist) gave the piece an electrifying reading, couching it in a lush tone and executing its complex interplay with pinpoint precision.

Interlocking figures were also important in Robert Ceely’s “Metamir” (2006), an animated chamber version of a work originally for tape and instruments, which still bears hints of otherworldly electronic textures.

Richard Cameron-Wolfe’s “ARQ: Region III — Refuge” (2008), a chamber orchestra work heard here in a version for violin and piano four-hands, is an abstruse meditation that occasionally emits soaring violin lines (played by David Fulmer).

The program also included Lewis Nielson’s “What About You?” (2007), a quirky trio (for violin, cello and bassoon) in which the musicians gamely vocalized while playing, and John Eaton’s “Our Four Candidates” (2008), a playful, nonpartisan portrait of the presidential and vice presidential candidates in the last election.

The American Composers Alliance Summer Music Festival runs through Saturday at the Leonard Nimoy Thalia at Symphony Space, 2537 Broadway, at 95th Street; (212) 864-5400, symphonyspace.org.

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