Flying on Contemporary Yet Traditional Wings

Not too long ago, one would not have expected to see a group like the young, modishly dressed Chicago-based new music sextet eighth blackbird on the Coleman Chamber Music series. But things have been changing at this once-immovable bastion of tradition lately, and the group’s collection of mostly newly commissioned works didn’t ruffle many feathers at Caltech’s Beckman Auditorium on Sunday afternoon.

Indeed, for all of the irreverence that this group flaunts--from the lowercase spelling of its name to the T-shirts and tattoos on sale at the souvenir table outside--one can also sense a deeply traditional strain in much of the music it plays.

One of its recent commissions, heard in only its second performance, was a piece from 86-year-old lion of serialism George Perle. “Critical Moments II” was unrepentant yet remarkably fresh in its spiky crystalline fragments, rapid atonal flurries and muted wisps of sound.

Another eighth blackbird commission, which occupied the program’s entire second half, was Daniel Kellogg’s “Divinum Mysterium,” generated by a 13th century vintage chant, equipped with sometimes playful Hebraic rhythms and sporting an overall structure that had the cumulative effect of a five-movement symphony.

The Minimum Security Composers Collective, a consortium of four onetime Yale graduate students, contributed four samples from “di/verge.” Though obviously contemporary in vocabulary, the four, when heard together, seemed to form a more or less traditional classical structure, complete with a scherzo and a slow movement in the usual places.

Ultimately, it was Aaron Jay Kernis’ “The Four Seasons of Futurist Cuisine” for piano trio and narrator that struck the most irreverent note of the afternoon, with its dada cookbook text and parodies of tasty morsels from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, Wagner’s “Parsifal,” Chopin’s Sonata No. 2 and Debussy’s “Clair De Lune,” among others.