Last night's listening was of a totally different kind: the sizable audience seemed to be in on the code--a modernist code exemplified in three pieces written during the past year by serious composers. It is a tuneless and mostly toneless kind of modernism related only in one work to a process that I recognize, in that case, dance.

Oddly, I thought, the concert ended with Stravinsky's Les Noces, written in the 1920's, programmed I suppose as the prototype for modernism. But there we had decidedly human interactions in the voices, in the solo roles, in the percussion accompaniment. That made it sound and feel very traditional, indeed.