Attending the opening concert of the La Jolla Athenaeum's new music festival Thursday (June 18) evening brought on a wave of unexpected nostalgia, starting with "Flight," Stuart Saunders Smith's 1978 duo for flute and piano. It immediately brought back the heady 1970s, when serial music was the lingua franca of the new music scene and the half-lives of Anton Webern-inspired atonal motifs seemed nearly infinite. Then Stefan Weisman's 2007 "SuperSoft," a time-suspended, ethereal cello solo, seemed to channel Olivier Messaien's great cello and piano duo from his "Quartet for the End of Time," written in the early months of World War II, only Weisman substituted the gentle, hypnotic malleting of bells and tuned metal pipes for Messiaen's slow chordal repetitions on the piano.

Christopher Burns' "Misprision" from 2001, a stark etude of stifled and inhaled motifs for guitar, cello and flute, proved to be a 1980s retro feast of musical ideas that dare not speak their name. Or recycled tweets for the tweeter generation. This recent example of "music for a new century," as the Athenaeum program proudly proclaims, is still yearning for the cone of silence that Webern's iconic canons approached and Igor Stravinsky's last decade of serial-imitations fell into. Of course, one of the meanings of the title "Misprision" is "to misunderstand," so it is entirely possible that I have misunderstood Burns' intentions. Given his title, that is also permitted.

Noise is the name of the 5-member ensemble that presents the Athenaeum's annual soundON festival, and they are a skilled, devoted crew of younger performers with evident passion for this repertory. Flutist Lisa Cella has mastered an impressive catalogue of traditional and extended techniques on her chosen instrument, and her clean, sharply-delineated lines and bold timbres served both the Smith and Burns pieces well. I admired Franklin Cox's well-paced solo in "SuperSoft" and the variety of colors he brought to Elliott Carter's 2008 "Duettino," which he played with guest violinist Mark Menzies. As the title implies, Carter has crafted a modest duo--it lasts barely five minutes; but this brilliant miniature allows each instrument to create a luminous plane of sound that nevertheless interacts cannily with the other. Menzies and Cox made a splendid case for this offering from America's 100-year-old wunderkind.

Peter V. Swendsen's 2008 "Bright Days of Little Sunlight" was the sole "nostalgia-free" offering of the evening, a quiet tone poem of acoustic and recorded sounds that evoked the stark yet vital qualities of winter in Norway. Much of the time the instruments (violin, flute, cello, guitar and percussion) barely played or made hovering sounds that only approached the customary timbre of each instrument, and the tape component projected just audible sounds recorded in remote natural settings. In this 10-minute piece that slowly grew and then disappeared, percussionist Morris Palter created a spectrum of subtle sounds from delicate triangle rings to light finger taps on a snare drum and bowing a gong. In this piece and others on the program, Palter's sensitive additions ensured that no one could reasonably dismiss him as a mere drummer.

Trevor Grahl's entertaining if indulgent bit of performance art, "Oranges and Lemons," found original applications for the melodica, a "toy" instrument typically used to render sentimental Parisian street songs. Grahl effectively used it for violent percussive accents and lurid glissandos, which fit in perfectly with the battery of noise-makers (including a bicycle horn and an alarm clock) performer Philip Skaller manipulated with evident glee on a table placed center stage. The grating digital recorded sounds added to the impression of a teen-ager becoming his video game. Great fun.

The soundON festival continues at the La Jolla Athenaeum through June 20, with a full day of performances and workshops Saturday.

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