A letter was recently sent to the Conservatory by a concerned older woman who had attended a Contemporary Music Ensemble concert in the fall. It was addressed to “Gentlemen,” and expressed her great discomfort and distress upon hearing any music written after 1930 — what she referred to as “zinger” pieces. The CME concert last Friday, consisting of music by Oberlin Faculty composers, contained only zinger pieces.

The first piece on the program, Randolph Coleman’s Soundprint III: In memoriam Ezra Pound created an atmospheric sound world around the audience. Percussion players, playing an array of metal instruments, were arranged in the balcony of Finney surrounding the audience on all sides. The timbre slowly changed, but remained always soft, always metallic, always scraping. At one point, members of the audience began whispering passages of Pound’s Canto 90, emphasizing the “s” sounds it contained. On stage, Tim Weiss conducted by being a human clock — his arms the second hand — and dancer Nusha Martynuk moved as slowly as possible, completing only one half turn during the entire course of the piece.

Lewis Nielson’s piece, Of Flesh and Stone, was definitely a zinger. It was relentless and often quite loud. The program notes described it as “a ride on a lethal roller coaster of polished chrome.” Nielson’s mind makes a postmodern vertical connection to Dante. “The souls of the lustful are blown about without rest for all eternity, caught between the lost pleasures of the flesh and the stone walls of the city of Dis.”

This type of surrealist association is usually found in film, not music, making Nielson even more of a postmodernist than he already was before writing this piece. The sound world was one in which “gestures twist and turn, turn inside out...evolve and demolish....” After this piece, the listener was quite literally left with the feeling that he or she has been turned inside out.

Game Plan, by Amelia Kaplan, was a very goofy piece. A simple descending melodic fragment was presented in as many ways as possible — by itself, overlapped, in varying tempi, in drastically differing orchestration. The result was a sort of a “game.” The material itself could easily accompany an animated rabbit falling off a cliff if one were to think of “Mickey Mousing” this music, and it definitely made me want to do that. What Kaplan did here was take “cartoon” or “game” music and give it an art music treatment.

Micromegas, by Ross Feller, was a highly complex piece, juxtaposing many contrasting elements. Feller was highly influenced by the architect Daniel Libeskind, who made a series of drawings entitled “Micromegas,” in which disparate objects collide in unexpected ways and normative spatial relationships are destroyed. In order to emulate this in the music, “The meters, durational subdivisions and macro divisions and tempi are all related to the same geometrically-derived event sequence, which is employed in order to engage the values of continual friction, disembodiment and an ever-shifting perspective.” This complex texture was pulled off extremely well by Weiss and the ensemble, to whom the piece was dedicated.

Rest assured that despite resistance to zinger pieces, CME will play again.