James Joyce and Tendrils of ’30s Swing

Cutting Edge Concerts New Music Festival at Symphony Space

The composer Victoria Bond has never been afraid to experiment with unusual combinations, musical and otherwise, in her Cutting Edge Concerts. The series, now in its 15th season, used to bring together musicians and representatives of other disciplines — chefs or architects, for example — in the hope of finding some sort of philosophical common ground. These days, Ms. Bond’s goals are strictly musical, and she has expanded the name of the series to Cutting Edge Concerts New Music Festival.

She still intends to do some reaching. The series, which includes five weekly concerts in the Leonard Nimoy Thalia Theater at Symphony Space, has traditionally focused on contemporary classical music in conventional styles. But this year’s prospectus includes flirtations with indie-classical hybrids.

At the opening installment on Monday evening, the first half of the program was devoted to unalloyed jazz, with works by Daniel Jamieson and Jim McNeely, performed by Mr. Jamieson’s Danjam Orchestra, a modern version of a big band, with a heavy complement of woodwinds and brasses, as well as electric guitar, piano, bass, drums and a vocalist who mostly doubled some of the instrumental lines.

The jazz composers were represented by two scores each: “A Desperate Act” and “Phantasm,” by Mr. Jamieson, and two pieces inspired by Paul Klee paintings, “Der Seiltänzer” (“The Tightrope Walker”) and “Tod und Feuer” (“Death and Fire”), by Mr. McNeely. Their styles were not radically different, perhaps because Mr. Jamieson studied with Mr. McNeely. They share an approach to harmony and color, and their music sounds rooted in 1930s swing, with touches of the chromaticism, deliberately loose intonation and melodic angularity of later incarnations of jazz.

The second half of the program began with Ms. Bond’s “Leopold Bloom’s Homecoming,” an inventive amplification of a passage from James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” for tenor and piano. Joyce’s writing — and “Ulysses,” particularly — has yielded reams of music over the last few decades, most notably the lush settings of Stephen Albert.

Ms. Bond’s score is spare and direct: the questions asked of Bloom, about how he spent his day, are spoken rather than sung, and Bloom’s musings are alternately lyrical and introspective, depending on Joyce’s wide-ranging imagery. Rufus Müller, the tenor, projected it with clarity, spirit and a warm, enveloping tone, and Jenny Lin gave a graceful account of the vital piano writing.

N. Lincoln Hanks’s energetic four-movement “Monstre Sacré” closed the program. The sacred monster of the title, Mr. Hanks explained, describes musicians whose peculiarities and social lapses we tolerate for the sake of their artistry. The only one he identified in his comments was the pianist Glenn Gould, which explains the passing references to Bach’s English and French suites, but not those to Gershwin, Prokofiev and other composers who flit through the piece).

The success of Mr. Hanks’s work was that it offered you enough purely musical twists that you stopped wondering which monsters he had in mind.

Cutting Edge Concerts New Music Festival runs through April 30 at the Leonard Nimoy Thalia Theater, Symphony Space, 2537 Broadway, at 95th Street; (212) 864-5400, symphonyspace.org.

A version of this review appeared in print on April 4, 2012, on page C3 of the New York edition with the headline: James Joyce and Tendrils of ’30s Swing.