The two newest pieces combined live acoustic performance with electronics. From San Antonio native (and anticapitalizationist) jack w. stamps came "your acquaintance," composed last year for clarinet, tape and "occasional piano."

About 10 minutes long, the piece poses an essentially melodic clarinet part and directly strummed piano strings against a very complex electronic backdrop comprising crowd noises, synthesized sounds and layers of world music. The tape environment was more interesting than the clarinet part, which was modernized romanticism with occasional Oriental tendencies, but the harmonic strangeness of the whole held attention. The excellent clarinetist Stephanie Key and the composer were the soloists.

Also dating from last year was James Mobberly's "Voices: In Memoriam" for piano and computer, a tribute to the New York City firefighters who died in the World Trade Center attack. The computer's role was to modify the poignant, glistening, wavelike piano part and feed the altered sounds into the mix. The results were lovely, though more a meditative sound space than a musical narrative. Pianist Kevin Richmond of the UTSA faculty played commandingly, with a keen sense of the music's pulse.

The oldest music was Malcolm Arnold's 1961 Quintet for Brass, most remarkable for the anguished dissonances of its dark slow movement. The lively outer movements mixed classical and pop idioms in Arnold's idiosyncratic, fascinating way. The performance, by the San Antonio Brass Ensemble, wanted more preparation.

Organist and composer William Albright, who died in 1998, was among the most brilliant and demanding creators for the king of instruments. William James Ross offered two movements from Albright's 1986 Symphony for Organ — the aptly titled "Tarantella macabre" and the final "Ritual," a processional with an air of unsettled expectancy, punctuated by explosive strikes on bass drum and bells (William Sherrill and David Heuser).

Lowell Liebermann's Sonata for Viola and Piano (Allyson Dawkins and Christine Debus) was a spare, pensive work with long-lined melodies in a stretched-tonal idiom. Most memorable was the central movement, with its long, serpentine ascent and perched-over-the-abyss climax.

Between some of the concert's main courses, trombonist Christopher Branagan shamelessly served comic-relief sorbets in the form of Fredrik Hoegberg's "Su Ba Do Be," a very bizarre and childish five-part performance-art tribute to Louis Armstrong.

The festival concludes tonight with a concert by Aura, the University of Houston's new music ensemble, at 7:30 p.m. in the fine arts building recital hall on the UTSA suburban campus.