The MATA Fes­ti­val turns 11 this week, and I’ve caught the first two nights, with the third (out of four) to come on Fri­day. There’s been a vari­ety of pol­ished, mostly well-made music with a stel­lar group of per­form­ers. This is a fes­ti­val, and an orga­ni­za­tion, ded­i­cated to emerg­ing com­posers, so there are gen­er­a­tional thoughts and ques­tions about What It All Means that I’m chew­ing on at the moment — while reach­ing for Ker­ouac — but still want to dis­cuss my impres­sions of the music so far.

Each night, Tues­day and Wednes­day, had a very dif­fer­ent and com­ple­men­tary qual­ity, with the for­mer firmly in the ter­ri­tory of post-Minimalism and post–Bang on a Can, and the lat­ter cer­tainly more exper­i­men­tal. Tues­day the fea­tures were an audi­ble beat, a clear and fre­quently shift­ing pulse, con­so­nant, sim­ple har­monies and phras­ing not unfa­mil­iar to any­one who grew up lis­ten­ing to rock music. Wednes­day there was music for lap­top, exper­i­ments with tun­ings, processes, alter­na­tive instru­ments and an empha­sis on open struc­tures and improvisation.

What stood out on Tuesday’s pro­gram, per­formed by var­ied groups from the superb ensem­bles The Knights, were Justin Messina’s AM: Obama and Joe Pereira’s Echi Dromi. Messina’s piece was the most exper­i­men­tal work on the pro­gram, a duet for per­cus­sion and the processed sounds of AM talk-radio hosts call­ing out our President’s name. It was an exper­i­ment that only half-succeeded; the per­cus­sion part was inter­est­ing and well-crafted, the elec­tronic part under­done, seem­ing to exist in a dif­fer­ent musi­cal frame­work than it’s human part­ner, and ulti­mately not con­vey­ing any par­tic­u­lar con­text or mean­ing for why we were hear­ing “Obama” being shouted. Echi Dromi, a per­sonal cre­ation of an imag­ined Mid­dle East­ern music, was grip­ping, expres­sive and exceed­ingly well-crafted, through com­posed and given a great per­for­mance by Alex Sopp on flute and Joe Gram­ley on per­cus­sion. While the rest of the con­cert fea­tured famil­iar repet­i­tive struc­tures, these works keep going to unex­pected, intu­itive places.

The open­ing work, Francesco Antonioni’s Mac­chine Inutili, is cer­tainly a prod­uct of the gen­er­a­tion that fol­lows David Lang (as he is part of the gen­er­a­tion that fol­lows Steve Reich and Louis Andriessen); pulse-patterns with shift­ing rhythms, jux­ta­po­si­tion of slow, long lines against faster rep­e­ti­tion. It’s a pol­ished piece. The open­ing move­ment of a cello con­certo by Mike Block was per­formed, the com­poser as soloist. It’s lively, fun, light-hearted, although since it’s put together in frag­ments that are placed sequen­tially — some returned to — it seems much more like a clos­ing move­ment, one that sums up the pre­ced­ing music and eschews devel­op­ment for con­clu­sion. Cor­davi and Fig was a large ensem­ble piece by Ted Hearne, with intrigu­ing tex­tures and sonori­ties. It flirts with dis­in­te­gra­tion and ends with a wel­come inde­ter­mi­nacy. A high­light was Sarah Snider’s lyri­cal trio for viola, bass clar­inet and marimba, good music that could have gone on longer. The cap­per was Prod­uct No. 1, an oddly com­pelling instrumental/vocal chorale — the musi­cians sang while play­ing — repeat­ing a tune the com­poser, Andrew Hamil­ton, had over­heard. The rep­e­ti­tion was straight, a la Gavin Bryars, and while it went on too long, it had a pleas­ingly boozy qual­ity which lin­gered after the applause had ended.

Wednes­day promi­nently fea­tured lap­top musi­cian Sawako, who com­bines elec­tronic music with field record­ings and also works with live per­form­ers. Her set included a duet with Miguel Fras­coni play­ing glass instru­ments — includ­ing water con­tain­ers — and two vio­lin­ists. Like all good elec­tronic musi­cians, she has a great ear for tim­bre and is com­fort­able with inde­ter­mi­nate struc­tures. Her exper­i­ment with sine-tones and the vio­lins mov­ing in and out of pitch was a lesser ver­sion of the work of Alvin Lucier and Giac­into Scelsi, but her open­ing and espe­cially con­clud­ing pieces, then, open­ing again and coda, were mesmerizing.

The sec­ond half was pro­vided by another ter­rific ensem­ble, Ne(x)tworks, all superb musi­cians, espe­cially the pianist Stephen Gosling, who gave a pow­er­house per­for­mance of Kate Moore’s Sen­si­tive Spot. This is a kind of etude, which places the pianist amidst record­ings of the same piece, a per­petuum mobile of repeated chords and bass notes. The result is a rich, beau­ti­ful tex­ture, full of shift­ing details, a demon­stra­tion of the spe­cific, inter­nal activ­ity in a seem­ing wall of sound. Shel­ley Burgon’s Josephine’s Tiger was a limpid, dream­like large ensem­ble work, sonorous and delib­er­ately frag­mented and intro­verted and was a com­plete suc­cess. Raster for quin­tet from Christo­pher McIn­tyre and Cor­nelius Duffalo’s mind­scape 2 were a lit­tle more prob­lem­atic. Raster is meant to be aggres­sive and to chal­lenge the audience’s ears and expec­ta­tions, which it does. Struc­turally it does not con­vince, though; there is a mas­sive piano inter­lude in the mid­dle which seems to belong to another work, and the dis­jointed, wry cli­max feels unpre­pared. Duffalo’s piece was heavy on impro­vi­sa­tion, which I say as an expe­ri­enced, and exper­i­men­tal impro­viser, is a good thing. The dan­ger is that impro­vi­sa­tion becomes just another kind of pre­dictable music, and while in this case the musi­cal results were clear and solid, the sense that any­thing might hap­pen, that some­thing com­pletely new might be said, was missing.

These were good pro­grams, with accom­plished musi­cians and com­posers. Not every­thing is going to work com­pletely, nor should it — the devel­op­ment and pre­sen­ta­tion work that MATA does is just as much a process as the music itself, and the com­posers are speak­ing clearly to an inter­ested and atten­tive audi­ence. The series con­tin­ues Fri­day and Sat­ur­day and Le Pois­son Rouge, with more excel­lent musi­cians, includ­ing Now Ensem­ble, So Per­cus­sion and Cenk Ergun. It’s a spring awakening.