It was a night for the interplay of unusual media for the Oberlin Contemporary Music Ensemble last Friday in Warner Concert Hall. Whether the piece called for textual readings, household percussion instruments or a visual art-French reading-chamber ensemble melange, CME, in all its various permutations and rearrangements, seemed up to the challenge.

The first piece, J.D.E. by Betsy Jolas was performed by an ensemble of 14 orchestral instruments that evoked the piece’s moody, tense colors.

The first sound was from a lone, low flute, followed slowly by high-pitched clarinet and violin matching timbre perfectly and eerily. A section of strangely moving chords and soft dissonance gave way to a passage of disjointed pizzicato, which introduced more complicated, responsive rhythms tossed back and forth between instruments.

Each section left the listener a little bit more unsettled, unsure as to the piece’s true nature. Jolas said of the cryptic letters in the composition’s title, “Like all acronyms today, this one soon takes on its own existence, independent of its origins,” leaving the piece and its meaning wide open to interpretation.

Life Story by Thomas Ades uses a Tennessee Williams poem from In the Winter of Cities to tell the story of a strange one-night stand. It is scored for two bass clarinets, string bass and soprano, which in this case included the talents of guest vocalist Tony Arnold.

Ades’ notes call for the vocals to be performed “in a style reminiscent of the late Billie Holiday,” an interesting call for a classically trained singer. Arnold’s interpretation was expressive and intimate nonetheless. She seemed to capture the essence of a musical gesture without giving the sense that she struggled with anything at all.

The instrumentalists tapped into some jazz inflections, lending their tone a great deal of range. Arnold ended the piece with a line that captured the piece’s brutal irony: “Well, one of you falls asleep / and the other one does likewise with a lighted / cigarette in his mouth / and that’s how people burn to death in hotel rooms.”

The attention of the audience shifted over to stage left for the next piece; assembled there was what looked like the living room set for a play. This was John Cage’s Living Room Music, four movements for “percussion and speech quartet,” as interpreted by the Oberlin Percussion Group, directed by Professor Michael Rosen.

During the first movement, “To Begin,” a nuclear family appeared – four people costumed as presumedly a father, mother and two sons. They proceeded to begin a percussion quartet played on household objects instead of percussion instruments. The father rustled his newspaper in time. The mother swept the floor, juxtaposing an odd meter over her husband’s. The two boys played with toys on the floor and joined in the family polyrhythm.

For the second movement, “Story,” the father left the “room,” presumably dressed for “work.” The mother pulled out a storybook, and her two sons gathered around. Together they began to trope rhythmically on a text from Gertrude Stein: “Once upon a time the world was round and you could go on it around and around.” Perhaps that is the essence of all stories in the end.

This performance pressed the question of how Cage’s music has affected attitudes about performance in popular culture; Blue Man Group, for example, may owe a significant debt to Cage and pieces such as Living Room Music.

The piece was originally premiered by amateur musicians – four bookbinders of Cage’s acquaintance. Its performance by four Oberlin Conservatory percussion majors changed its context significantly. This particular rendition could not help but imply that maybe this is what music majors do for fun when they sit around in the living room.

Professor of Composition Ross Feller wrote Triple Threat in 1994 for a virtuoso clarinetist, trumpeter and violinist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, but when clarinetist Paul Zonn was stricken by an illness that took his life in 2000, Feller decided he could not have the piece performed – until last Friday night, when CME finally premiered Triple Threat after 12 years. This time, Feller found his virtuosos in senior students clarinetist Jacob Wise, trumpeter Avi Bialo and violinist Tae-Hee Im.

Feller’s program notes describe “a musical terrain endowed with a series of opposed multiplicities, featuring eclectic, borderline materials, and states in which the soloists and various ensemble constellations often compete for the listener’s attention.” That was certainly an accurate, if erudite, description of what transpired in Triple Threat. Feller’s piece began with the entire ensemble in violent dynamism. Sliding strings characterized a second section, sounding uncannily like a phonograph record slowing down as someone places a finger on its rotation.

Then the two percussionists, one on drum set and one on orchestral percussion, instigated a battle amongst themselves, building to a climax that launched the three soloists off into an unaccompanied bout of virtuosity. The percussionists returned to overtake the soloists, having the last word as the piece concluded with the slap of a wood stick. Feller appeared on stage afterwards to shake hands and bow.

In Ecrits sur Toiles, Gilbert Amy’s meditation on the interaction between art and music, CME conductor Timothy Weiss made several decisions that made the piece simultaneously more accessible and more aesthetic to the audience.

Amy wrote the piece in musical response to letters written by German poet Rainer Maria Rilke on three paintings: El Greco’s “Toledo,” Cezanne’s “Madame Cezanne in a Red Armchair” and Picasso’s “Death of Harlequin.” Weiss chose first to project the paintings on a large screen on stage as the piece progressed, so that the audience could have some point of comparison for the recitation. He also chose to keep the recitation, brought to life by senior Alice Teyssier, in the original French, because of the aesthetic beauty of the language.

The resulting mixed media experience was provocative indeed: the words spoke to the paintings, and the music spoke wordlessly to both. The only regrettable fact was that the music periodically overwhelmed Teyssier’s voice. The horn, cello and clarinet teamed up against a rhythmic violin-piano-cello unit (the cello being the middle man) exchanging more and more atonal runs.

As the music dropped down, the recitation ended with some self-reflective thoughts from Swiss artist Paul Klee on the interaction between art and music: “What is bewildering after the disappearance of the subject in painting, is that today music and graphic art take each other as subject. This short circuit of the arts unbeknownst to nature or even to the imagination is for me today’s most worrisome phenomenon – and yet a liberating phenomenon.”