If the death of classical music is its oldest, finest tradition, no one has bothered to tell Ossia. The members of Eastman School of Music's student-run new music ensemble taste possibility. They grab at the inventive, the strange, and the original with a shared conviction that the line from J.S. Bach to John Cage pushes well into the future.� If the line doubles back on occasion, it only affirms they're on the right track. In the strange case of the piece "3 Groups," a coincidence fuels more hope that the best is yet to be.

On a recent afternoon, students Baljinder Sekhon and Matthew Barber dragged a blue plastic case the size of a portable playpen into the center of a room at Eastman. They peeled back the cover. Inside rested hundreds of musical scores, stuffed into paper shopping bags, envelopes, and cardboard boxes.

All of them were entries in Ossia's second annual International Composition Prize contest. Sekhon, the ensemble's president, held up a stack of music wrapped in a rubber band.

"The quality of the submissions was very high," he said.

Every year, Ossia invites composers to enter their new works in a contest for a $500 prize, and the chance to hear their piece performed by a top-notch new music ensemble. This year 268 scores flew in from dozens of countries, including the United States, Italy, China, and Israel. Submissions were up fourfold from last year, in part because Ossia allowed composers to enter pieces that had already been played in public.

Meetings ensued. Nine judges sat in chairs in a circle, sifting through the music and debating its merits, Sekhon says. They noticed a few trends. Musical conversations are in vogue - about a quarter of the submissions were called "Dialogue." There were several Spanish vocal pieces and more than one based on verses by Spanish poet Federico Garc�a Lorca. The percentage of submissions from women composers shot up compared to last year.�

After weeks of talking, Ossia's judges picked their winner, "3 Groups," by Anthony Green, a doctoral student in composition at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Judges also awarded two honorable mentions in the competition to Daniel Tacke, a doctoral student at the University of California, San Diego, and Ram�n Souto of Vigo, Spain. This is the second year in a row the Eastman ensemble has picked a piece that allows the players room to improvise.

Here's the weird coincidence: Green originally wrote "3 Groups" for an offshoot of Ossia, the wildly successful New York City-based professional ensemble, Alarm Will Sound. Its members started playing together in Ossia at Eastman in the 1990's, and the after recording Steve Reich's "Tehillim," they decided not to disband after graduation, instead morphing into Alarm will Sound. When Alarm visited Green's university in 2007, it played "3 Groups" in a workshop, giving him the chance to hear it out loud for the first time.

The composer's connection to Alarm Will Sound surprised members of Ossia, who judged the contest entries blindly.

"It's unique," says Sekhon.

When it receives its first public performance in Rochester this week, it will be coming full circle.

Ossia will also perform Tacke's ethereal "Die Nacht War Kalt" for soprano, clarinet, cello, and piano, and Souto's intricate "En Sospenso" for flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, percussion, piano, violin, viola, cello, and bass. Listeners will also hear British composer Harrison Birtwhistle's delicate "Four Songs of Autumn" and Italian Luigi Nono's introspective "Sofferte Onde Serene" for solo piano and tape.

Green grew up in Providence, Rhode Island, and played piano for a gospel choir. He admires the experimental music of Karlheinz Stockhausen and James Tenney. "3 Groups," he says, is based on a 12-tone pattern by the experimental American composer Tenney.� It's played by fifteen instrumentalists, separated into clusters onstage.� The conductor plays traffic cop, cueing the musicians to change modes every few seconds. Since each player is given a few notes to improvise on at a time, there's a lot of room for creativity.

As it begins, sounds like droplets plink softly while wind instruments heave and saw. After a few seconds, the players flutter and sigh, sliding up Gershwin-style by 6ths and 7ths. The volume swells. A trombone barks. More sawing and plunking lulls and then explodes in a brassy outcry. Players trill and roar, blatting and drumming as a muted trumpet cries. Pause. The clarinet speaks softly in a Copland-esque manner, and then the listener is left suspended, listening to breath pushed through instruments without vibration. An almost imperceptible B-natural fades to black.

"I want my listeners to be bathed in a sonic texture," the composer says. He'll arrive in Rochester this week to hear Ossia premiere the eight-minute piece. "As a composer, I also think of Bach, Chopin, Debussy, and Eric Brown," he says. "I want my work to honor the work of the past."

Anyone familiar with the European post-war avant-garde period will recognize the musical vocabulary of "3 Groups." But its emotional spirit is less definable.

"A big part of being human is the split between emotions and thinking," says Ossia conductor Matthew Barber. "A piece like this creates its own unnamed emotion."

Brenda Tremblay will host radio broadcasts from the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra beginning April 8 on WXXI-FM Wednesdays at 8 p.m. She also blogs about music at wxxi.org.

Ossia

Friday, March 27

Kilbourn Hall, 26 Gibbs St.

8 p.m. | Free | 274-1100, esm.rochester.edu