Ensemble Green’s Thursday concert at the Ruskin Art Club presented what I would call an American Gebrauchsmusik, the latest model of Hindemith’s “music for use” begun in 1920s Germany. Like Hindemith’s music, it is above all things a functional art, solid, written with respect for the composer’s craft and the agility of the performers. In its American version, it can most easily be described as ambivalent: not quite tonal or atonal, rhythmic, but not often memorably so, not exclusively melodic or textural, surprisingly current or dated. The use of unusual techniques, such as multiphonics or flutter-tongue, frequently seems calculated to assert modernity rather than for any musical effect. It is yielding to the public, yet pleases no one.

It is also the music of awards and institutional support, its devotees, academics.  Six of the 8 composers presented have their Ph.D. in music, a testament to the years, even decades, of training required to produce such work. It is music for an audience that demands composers’ degrees, awards, and current academic jobs to be listed in the program notes. The aim of the art is quantifiable skill; it pleads for respect.

Filament, a short piece for glasses and flute by Paul David Thomas, was one of the more direct works on the program.  It had an appealing austerity for such a fey duo, largely because of the dedicated reading by Ensemble Green’s flutist Julie Long and percussionist Andrea Moore. The flute and rubbed glass blended well; the bright ringing of the glass sounded like flute ambience when they played unisons, a ghostly effect that suggests the work was more about tone-color than melody.  Its limited gamut of notes gave the work clarity and an attractive simplicity – something of the original spirit of Hindemith’s Gebrauchsmusik.

Shadowings, by Matthew Schreibeis, was one of two works on the program that were explicitly about ghosts (the other was Piotr Szewczyck’s Apparitions).  The composer was inspired by the myth-based stories of Lafcadio Hearn set in turn of the century Japan. (In the program notes, Schriebeis mentions a demon and a man-eating goblin called a jikininki.) The composer interpreted Hearn’s “shadowings” musically: slow glissandi in the strings hovered around sustained pitches in the woodwinds, trembling thirds in the flute and clarinet were underscored by raspy bowing, Debussian whole-tone passages implied the uncanny. It was an evocative piece; Schreibeis has a talent for allusive writing.

Christopher Gainey’s Iago for solo violin was the night’s most virtuosic display piece, with lots of strident harmonies written in a mostly Romantic fashion, fast chromatic passages, dissonant arpeggios etc.  It was Gainey’s take on Iago’s villainy in Othello, with echoes of the diabolus in musica, both the interval of a tritone and Niccolò Paganini’s rumored pact with the devil.  Iago is cliché, but it was deftly played by Elizabeth Hedman.