MEMORABLE AT MONADNOCK: composer Elliott Carter, cellist Fred Sherry, soprano Susan Narucki, and conductor James Bolle.

Composers have been setting poems to music for centuries. Why? Most good poems have their own music and can stand alone. And why would any composer want to set a bad poem? There are answers to both questions. Artists in one medium have always wanted to respond to great art in another medium. Some composers can transcend the technical ineptitude or sentimentality of negligible poems and provide music that adds new layers of complexity and depth. What a successful art song requires is the give-and-take between the word and the notes. Every song — even a popular song — is a kind of dialogue.

The Janus 21 concert a week ago Tuesday, "American Voices: Wisdom, Wit & Grace," offered song cycles by Virgil Thomson and Paul Bowles, who chose poems of great interest in themselves (Thomson’s Prayers and Praises includes poems by Richard Crashaw and Anonymous; Bowles’s Blue Mountain Ballads are four witty and moving lyrics by Tennessee Williams) and added their own visions of them — personal and inventive responses to both the prosody and the meaning of the poems. Ned Rorem and Vartan Aghababian, who’s not yet 40 and will be a graduate student in composition at BU this fall, chose poems on a less consistent level of inspiration and treated them with professional competence but without originality or fresh insight. October, Aghababian’s cycle of poems from Robert Frost’s pre–World War I first book (A Boy’s Will), could have been composed before Aghababian was born. The poems have a 19th-century diction, yet small shadows across the pastoral landscape are moments of pure Frost. But the music remained anonymous — old-fashioned, pretty, and conventional.

Rorem’s settings of such formally conservative poets as Robert Hillyer, Paul Goodman, and Howard Moss were slicker and emptier, numbingly "American," covering with an oil slick of sentimentality poems already dangerously close to that. Monologue, not dialogue. Instead of revealing the inner workings of the poems, Rorem forces the texts into his own musical straitjacket. Every poem sounded the same, including snippets of Whitman and Gertrude Stein. The best that could be said for either Rorem or Aghababian is that the selections were off the beaten track.

All four composers had powerful advocates in mezzo-soprano Jane Struss (Thomson and Bowles), tenor Michael Calmès, and pianist Brian Moll, all in top form. Calmès located the charm in Rorem’s setting of Stein’s little "I Am Rose." Struss, especially in the last of the Thomson settings, "Jerusalem, My Happy Home," had more ferocious technical demands but the easier job because the music was superior. Her extraordinary rhythmic sensitivity, matching the composers’, conveys an immediacy of response — the sense that she is living through what she sings about. Bowles’s "Heavenly Grass" — a proto-spiritual ("My feet took a walk/In heavenly grass") — is one of the most æthereal art songs composed by an American, and Struss has made it her own. Her tender, inward rendering of Thomson’s "Before Sleeping" ("Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John,/Bless the bed that I lie on") was a miracle of knowing innocence.

The program closed with a selection of actual spirituals that brought together many of the preceding themes. Struss’s "There Is a Balm in Gilead" (which I first heard her sing at Elizabeth Bishop’s memorial 23 years ago), especially the pianissimo final repeat, poured over the audience like a healing salve. Maybe the high point of the evening was her devastating "Were You There" ("Were you there when they crucified my Lord?"). Calmès sang "Wayfaring Stranger" a cappella and obviously enjoyed unleashing his Loo-si-ana upbringing in an uninhibited "Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho." Amen!

ELLIOTT CARTER is one of the contemporary music’s most compelling poetic-text setters. In Bishop, Lowell, Ashbery, Montale, Ungaretti, and Quasimodo he has chosen some of the 20th-century’s most challenging and rewarding poets. His latest song cycle, Of Rewaking, first performed this spring in Chicago and given its East Coast premiere at Monadnock Music this past Sunday, has three extraordinary poems by William Carlos Williams, not anthology pieces but poems the 94-year-old composer has chosen about the possibilities of surviving the battering of time, of living beyond "the silly world of history" to extend time in a world of imagination that can "startle us anew."

Carter’s method is to use the vocal line as recitative, with the orchestra as a kind of Greek chorus punctuating, embellishing, and undercutting the words with its own commentary. "The Rewaking" is blown by pastoral winds that are not without threats of danger. "Lear" is about life as "the storm in the trees," with the poem surrounded and interrupted by a complex battery of percussion instruments banging and crashing — or, in a shimmer of marimba and hushed cymbals, the "figures/that appear solid" suddenly melt and become "like/smoke from bonfires blowing away." In the climactic "Shadows," long vocal arcs of soaring lyricism are washed with rainbow spumes of orchestral color or are agitated by tense and ominous orchestral rhythms.

Nowhere did it seem that Carter hadn’t invested all his thought and feeling in this sound world. Monadnock’s James Bolle led a powerful yet thoughtful performance, and soprano Susan Narucki, one of Carter’s most satisfying interpreters, sang with her customary elegance of tone, rhythmic alertness, and clarity of both diction and feeling.

This was preceded by the New England premiere of Carter’s Cello Concerto, which he composed in 2000. In seven continuous sections, the heroic cello, played magnificently by another familiar Carter exponent, Fred Sherry, takes us an adventure at least as dramatic as the one Richard Strauss devises in his tone poem Don Quixote, where the cello plays the title role. "My Cello Concerto," Carter writes, "is introduced by the soloist alone, playing a frequently interrupted cantilena that presents ideas later to be expanded into movements. . . . In this score, I have tried to find meaningful, personal ways of revealing the cello’s vast array of wonderful possibilities."

That "cantilena" is an expressive song: yearning, nostalgic, elegiac, hopeful. And the interruptions — bang! — are shocking — bang! — and scary. The hero is impassioned (Allegro appassionato) or comical (Giocoso). Or maybe he’s the object of the joke played on him by the world around him: wood blocks in a kind of syncopated ticking (an inebriated time bomb), slapped bongo drums, tapped cymbals, and snares (appropriately named). Things slow down (Lento) as the cello becomes mournful while eerie high winds appear like will-o’-the-wisps. Our hero takes command (Maestoso), accompanied by supporting (or ironic?) brasses. In one of the best of Carter’s great slow movements (Tranquillo), the high cello song is shadowed by another, deeper cello in the orchestra. Pizzicato eruptions arouse the soloist’s commanding pizzicatos. The "shadows" persist, then all hell breaks loose in the final Allegro fantastico. The cello lashes out, there’s no stopping him. The orchestra listens quietly, then lashes back with pounding timpani and brassy outbursts. But the cello has the final word, and it goes out in a poignant, rippling flourish of strummed and plucked strings, like a Harlequin’s guitar.

Conductor, orchestra, soloist, and composer (who had flown in from London) received a standing ovation from the enthralled crowd, which included some notable musicians. Monadnock Music has been a long-time Carter advocate, and these beautifully prepared performances were outstanding on every level of technical accomplishment and interpretive conviction.

The outpouring of outstanding work in Carter’s 10th decade has been one of the phenomena of contemporary music. Of any music. Whether extended, ambitious works like the Cello Concerto, Of Rewaking, or the 2001 Oboe Quartet or shorter, gnomic, celebratory pieces like the gorgeous English-horn solo A 6 Letter Letter, a 1996 tribute to the late conductor and music patron Paul Sacher on his 90th birthday (gorgeously played by Heinz Holliger on a two-disc set on ECM, Lauds and Lamentations: Music of Elliott Carter and Isang Yun — the late Korean composer whom Carter championed), Carter’s pieces of recent years have an immediacy and freshness that are rare in composers half his age. (A bunch of them are on two new CDs. The ECM set includes Holliger in the Oboe Quartet, which Carter composed for him. It’s also played superlatively by members of New York’s Speculum Musicae on a Bridge CD, Volume 5 of its ongoing "Music of Elliott Carter" series, along with works for solo bass clarinet, clarinet duet, solo cello with Fred Sherry, solo piano with Charles Rosen, and Carter’s 1994 song cycle, Of Challenge and of Love, for soprano and piano, using poems by John Hollander.)

The Monadnock program began with a well-played performance of Romanian composer George Enescu’s suavely elegant Dixtuor for 10 winds, which sounded more like Fauré, Enescu’s teacher, than any of Enescu’s more ethnic Romanian music. And it ended with another 21st-century work, Bolle’s own brand new Piano Concerto — a three-movement, three-ring circus of piece, "like a cycle of lyric poems, or perhaps more like a writer’s diary" into which, Bolle says, he wanted to include "everything." Its various episodes encompass captivating 15th- and 16th-century tunes by Lasso and Ockeghem, a "valse funebre," passages marked "capriccioso," "cantabile," "but very nervously," and "nonchalant." More than any other composer, Prokofiev seemed the guiding spirit. Konstantin Lifschitz was the accomplished soloist; Jocelyn Bolle, the composer’s wife and guiding spirit of Monadnock, was the intrepid page turner.

EARLIER IN THE DAY, a mile from the Peterborough Town House, 84-year-old dance legend Merce Cunningham accepted the MacDowell Colony medal — the first awarded to a choreographer (in the new category "interdisciplinary art"). Composer/choreographer Meredith Monk introduced him and intoned three mysterious and playful songs of her own that were unaccompanied and wordless except for the letters M-E-R-C-E. Cunningham was enchanted — who wouldn’t be? He described the chance operations of his forthcoming new dance work, which has music by Radiohead. Decisions about the order, costumes, and lighting will be made by a roll of the dice in front of the audience before each performance. He ended with an oracular question aimed at every artist: "What do you do when a blackout comes? Do you run and hide or do you share the adventure?"