SOUNDS AROUND TOWN : The X Factor : Xtet sends a splinter quartet from its 12-member ranks to play at the Ventura Arts Council’s current City Hall series.

Exactly what, the curious listener wants to know, is an Xtet?

The members are eager to point out that the X stands for an X factor rather than the Roman numeral for 10. What you get from an Xtet performance is a portable, variable ensemble of musicians numbering between two and 12.

When they arrive at Ventura City Hall this weekend--in the second concert of the Ventura Arts Council’s current City Hall series--Xtet will amount to a quartet. Percussionist David Johnson, cellist Roger Lebow, clarinetist David Ocker and pianist Vicki Ray will be representing the highly regarded Los Angeles-based chamber group, which is just finishing its sixth official concert season.

Ventura’s program features varying combinations of those present, performing Leonard Bernstein’s “Sonata for Clarinet and Piano,” George Crumb’s venturesome piano piece “Makrokosmos, Vol. 2,” David Ocker’s “Backward, Looking, Forward,” and “Seduction of Sapientia” by David Rosenboom (currently head of the music department at CalArts).

Xtet often sends out splinter groups from the 12-member-strong ranks of the full group. Scaling down is an integral part of responding to the varying venues and repertoire of chamber music.

“We’ve developed some interesting programs out of this format,” Johnson said from the living room of his house in Eagle Rock, where he, Lebow and Xtet bassoonist-composer John Steinmetz gathered for an interview last week.

“Some people might think of it as a compromise, but it’s a direction that can foster different subtexts. And the fact is that the chamber music repertoire of all of this century--which is where about 90% of our repertoire comes from--is for mixed ensembles. Pieces are written for various combinations rather than for fixed ensembles.”

While on the subject of misconceptions about the group, Lebow scoffed at the notion that Xtet is, by strict definition, a new-music group. In their repertoire are many pieces from the early 20th Century, such as Schoenberg’s 1912 chamber masterpiece “Pierrot Lunaire.”

“We play some stuff that’s even from before 1900,” said Lebow.

Still, the group responds readily to the call of the new, with an emphasis on music by living composers.

“We all love new music in this group, otherwise we wouldn’t have gotten started,” said Lebow, “but the balance is always something that goes back and forth.”

At times, Xtet’s new music reputation precedes them.

“We’ve played a few concerts where the presenters asked us to play a fair amount of new music because they wanted us to be the pickled ginger in the sushi menu,” said Steinmetz. “So, that becomes part of a communications challenge--getting this music across to people who are not necessarily aficionados.”

One of the pieces on the City Hall program is Steinmetz’s “Possessed,” a composition for solo cello.

“Well, it’s not only for cello,” said Lebow. “It’s also for the speaker inside of my head, screaming to get out.”

The score involves patter during the performance, a kind of running interior monologue as the music goes by. “It’s a very funny piece,” Lebow explained. “The challenges are to speak and to not laugh, and also to play the music, which can be very difficult at times.”

Steinmetz’s compositional output basically falls into two, usually distinct, categories--the sublime and the ridiculous. “Possessed” is among the latter. In another Steinmetz work, the performer is instructed to fling “individually wrapped cheese slices” at the audience.

Levity is more than a laughing matter with Xtet. “Classical music has a bad rap with a lot of younger people,” said Steinmetz. “You go and people are dressed very formally. We try to keep things a little bit light. We try to present things in a way that is casual.”

Normally, Xtet tends to land in college auditoriums, and on the Monday Evening Concert schedule at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

The group was a logical choice for the first annual New Music Festival at UCSB last week. On one concert program there, Xtet was featured on Steven Stucky’s “Boston Fancies” and also on “Groupwise,” by the festival’s featured guest composer, Milton Babbitt. They managed to give taut, focused realizations of both Stucky’s rambling eclecticism and Babbitt’s die-hard 12-tone piece.

Sometimes they find themselves booked into odd venues. Last summer, for instance, they played at a special function inside the Los Angeles Zoo, “next to the rhinoceroses,” said Lebow.

Steinmetz sees the challenge with Xtet as one of trying to “understand its place in the culture. We also have to figure out how to be the right kind of advocate for doing beautiful music that requires some involvement from your audience. They have to learn a little bit in order to find the beauty that’s there.

“A lot of us feel this irony because, by day, we might be playing music for a movie. If we mention that to relatives or other people we know, they become excited. It’s immediately recognizable. We come home feeling exhausted and depressed from that work.

“Then we work very, very, hard to play these chamber music pieces, which are not known at all. It can be a troubling contrast to live in both of those worlds.”

To whatever degree they can sway the general listening public, the members of Xtet still know they are appealing to special interests and acquired tastes.

“We’re talking about doing something at a very high level but that appeals to a very small collection of connoisseurs,” Steinmetz said. “Even what we think of as mainstream chamber music has a relatively following. Pieces that we’re interested in recording, that are unusual, would appeal to an even smaller group than that.”

Small but mighty, and devoted.

ONWARD TO OJAI: This year’s Ojai Festival, taking place May 29-31, promises to be one of the stronger festivals of recent years. Conductor Pierre Boulez returns to the helm, where he was last seen in 1989.

The 1990 festival’s uneven smorgasbord of contemporary American music kept audiences away in droves. Last year’s safe-leaning nod to Mozart seduced them back.

This year, Boulez and company propose to set the Ojai philosophy straight again by serving up heaping doses of 20th-Century classics, sprinkled lightly with Beethoven and Ravel. Of key interest is the May 29 performance of Stravinsky’s ‘L’ Histoire du Soldat, stage-directed by Peter Sellars.

* WHERE AND WHEN

Xtet will perform at Ventura City Hall at 501 Poli St., Saturday at 8 p.m. For more information, call the Ventura Arts Council at 653-0828.