From Fromm players, electronic music through the decades

This year, the German composer Hans Tutschku programmed the concerts, which took place Friday and Saturday nights in Paine Hall, each one followed by a late-night presentation of music by Karlheinz Stockhausen. The events were grouped under the somewhat misleading banner of "60 Years of Electronic Music," implying a comprehensiveness that was, of course, not feasible. The concerts instead offered an idiosyncratic march through the decades, including some big names and leaving out just as many. Friday's program was an enjoyable affair nonetheless, with a student-rich audience that clearly had no trouble accepting the program on its own terms.

The evening began with flutist Patti Monson's assured performance of Martin Bresnick's "Conspiracies" (1979), which layers live and tape flutes in a kind of meditative tapestry, leaning heavily on flutter-tongue techniques but also on more unusual multiphonics that give the impression of unbraiding the flute sound into its component wisps. The program's sole link to the formative decade of the 1950s was Morton Feldman's "Intersection," a brief work for magnetic tape in which abstract noise and highly processed samples collide in a jittery collage.

Brian Ferneyhough's music is known for its prickly love of extreme complexity, so by the composer's own standards, "Mnemosyne" (1986) is a rather subdued meditation that features bass flute conversing with taped material. For once, the stitching of Ferneyhough's music remains mostly on the inside, and, in Monson's capable hands, an aggressively complicated score came across with a positively mellow disposition. The surface of the sound appeared to glitter from all angles like water.

Helmut Lachenmann, a leading figure in contemporary German music, is a visiting professor at Harvard this semester. Presumably to honor his local presence, the concert included his "Pression" (1969-70) for solo cello, a mesmerizing work that has nothing to do with electronic music but employs an invented language of extended string techniques. In this case, David Russell used his cello bow to whack, tickle, scrape, and caress his instrument from every angle imaginable, producing both eerie sounds and a kind of riveting gestural theater.

Clarinetist Michael Norsworthy and pianist Stephen Olsen made a persuasive case for David Felder's "Colección Nocturna" (1982-83), a set of fractured variations inspired by a Pablo Neruda poem. But the work that stood out in this company, like the hip guest at a straitlaced party, was Steve Reich's "New York Counterpoint" (1985). Clarinetist Evan Ziporyn masterfully volleyed lines back and forth with a gaggle of prerecorded B-flat and bass clarinets, finding in the staggered canons, buzzing drones, jazzy riffs, and metric sleights of hand both an urban funkiness, and thanks to the combined tenor of all those clarinets, an aggregated joy.

Jeremy Eichler can be reached at jeichler@globe.com.