Network for New Music's 30 for 30

For three decades, Network for New Music has demonstrated how composers bring order out of random materials to make coherent, often thrilling statements about life and art. But for its 30th-anniversary concert Sunday at the Settlement School, it threw order and coherence to the winds.

In a hall packed with composers, Linda Reichert's group presented Made by All and Not by One, a game of chance and wit composed by 30 composers in the fashion of the parlor game Exquisite Corpse. Each had 48 hours to write six bars, knowing only the last bar of the composer before. The opening six bars were Augusta Read Thomas' "Passion Prayers" for piano, cello and flute, but no one knew that, and this evolving work grew, posed, joked, wandered, faced backward, chose heroism, achieved some climaxes, and closed - sort of.

The 30 composers plotted quick sketches of themselves and sometimes-deft references to ancestors, yet the result was mysteriously cogent. Here was a piece worth hearing again, not as a guessing game, but as a sturdy quilt by craftsmen and -women accustomed to making big statements with minimal means. These pieces were ably sewn together by Network veterans Susan Nowicki, piano; Priscilla Lee, cello, and Edward Schultz, flute.

Before the performance, Reichert tried to introduce the work, but was met by a standing ovation, celebrating her courage as founder and panache as unstinting promoter of new music. Her ensemble has commissioned or premiered works by 251 men and women.

Composer Richard Brodhead (one of the 30), who is board president, announced the ensemble is establishing a fund to provide commissioning money "for our next 30 years."