You can dress unruly children in Sunday clothes for church, but that doesn’t mean they won’t fidget throughout the service. Or does it? On Thursday night at Merkin Concert Hall, the Tribeca New Music Festival presented two fascinating chamber ensembles built around the electric guitar: a relative newcomer to the concert-music sphere, still reluctant to curb its exuberance or disguise its roots in popular idioms. One behaved; the other, not so much.

Dither, the electric-guitar quartet of Taylor Levine, David Linaburg, Joshua Lopes and Kobe Van Cauwenberghe (a substitute player), dressed casually and sat hunched amid a snarled profusion of effects pedals and cables. Redhooker, led by the guitarist and composer Stephen Griesgraber, came on in matching dark suits and ties, and assembled in a more orderly rank.

What each group played adhered, more or less, to the image it projected. Dither opened with “Entropion,” part of “Cross-Sections,” a longer piece by the composer Lisa R. Coons heard on the quartet’s debut CD, “Dither.” Gangly picked lines and strummed chords tangled and jostled in unruly webs, linking briefly into stair-stepping unisons before falling apart again.

“Interference Logic,” by Tristan Perich, pitted Dither against Mr. Perich’s customized low-tech circuitry, termed 1-bit electronics. Guitars strummed steadily and microchips peeped incessantly in a 25-minute arc from clean tone to distortion. One step beyond early Philip Glass and Rhys Chatham, this was Minimalism as punk-rock provocation, played at penetrating volume to maximize the overtone fog.

I found Mr. Perich’s piece invigorating, but at least one audience member disagreed, clamping her hands over her ears throughout. Her seat was empty after intermission.

Pity, because she might have found relief in Mr. Griesgraber’s contemplative reveries. Four compositions from Redhooker’s second CD, “Vespers,” showed Mr. Griesgraber’s style: the steady arpeggios, slow harmonic motion and simple melodies of Minimalism wielded with a pop-inspired concision, and a dreamy looseness emphasized with electronic effects.

The other members of Redhooker — Maxim Moston and Ben Lively on violins; Peter Hess on bass clarinet; Derek Muro on alto saxophone and electric keyboard — hailed from prominent indie-rock groups and Broadway orchestras. Mindful of their versatility, Mr. Griesgraber gave them room to improvise.

That interactivity seems to be shaping Mr. Griesgraber’s latest works. “Swimming Blind,” a new piece, opened with mysterious, gloomy rumbles and restless jitters before eventually cohering around a twinkling keyboard figure into a stately seven-beat melody. The bucolic rising and falling lines in another new piece, “The Middle Three,” provided a soothing lullaby at the end of a restless night.

The Tribeca New Music Festival continues on Tuesday night at Galapagos, 16 Main Street, in Dumbo, Brooklyn; (718)222-8500; galapagosartspace.com.

Ethel: The string quartet, featuring, from left, Ralph Farris, Mary Rowell, Cornelius Dufallo and Dorothy Lawson, performed at Merkin Concert Hall on Monday as part of the Tribeca New Music Festival.

Given that they were writing specifically for Ethel, the six composers who supplied new works (a seventh, Corey Dargel, performed an earlier song cycle) made the most of the quartet’s distinctive personality. This is a group that spends much of its time traveling the modern Silk Road, where caravans of avant-garde, pop, jazz and world music barter riffs and techniques. And its approach to sound — its players use electric instruments, often with processing devices — gives it an extraordinary flexibility. It prizes grittiness and punch as absolute values, but these expert players can produce a conventionally warm, unified tone when the music demands it.

Matt Marks, Anna Clyne and Judd Greenstein all produced works with electronic tracks as crucial thematic and textural elements. In “Mixtape” Mr. Marks used fragments of what he called “irredeemably banal pop songs” — the players’ guilty pleasures, apparently — in mash-ups that buried the tunes in reverberation, noise (wind sounds, for example) and light percussion, with string lines woven around their melodies. The original songs are inaudible but for stray slivers, and in the end they were beside the point: the attraction here was the energy and inventiveness of Mr. Marks’s scoring.

In Ms. Clyne’s “Shadow of the Words,” built around a straightforward, recorded reading of Baudelaire’s “Harmonies du Soir” (the electronic track also includes a hefty, rumbling bass line), the quartet writing is atmospheric and flexible, with acerbic, raucous stretches morphing into surprisingly traditional passages, including a lilting waltz.

Mr. Greenstein’s “Octet 1979,” named for the year of his birth and the vintage of the classic pop synthesizers he used to make the work’s electronic component, is a bright, amusing hybrid: though Mr. Greenstein said he thought of the quartet and synthesizer writing as a dialogue, the effect was more like an overarching, fluid commentary by the strings on the rhythmically tight sequences and buzzing timbres of the four synthesizer tracks.

Rick Baitz’s “Chthonic Dances” and Randall Woolf’s “Dream Manifold” draw on pop moves of different sorts. For Mr. Baitz, Brazilian rhythms (often in a pizzicato cello line, sometimes driven home by the full ensemble) underpin a chord progression that evokes the lively spirit of South African township rock in a bright-hued, vigorously melodic score. Mr. Woolf’s work, for quartet and piano (with Kathleen Supové playing the supple, jazzy piano line), is built on bluesy figures but morphs into an imaginative fantasy in which sliding string chords create the effect of slowed-down time.

Andy Akiho joined the quartet on steel pans for his own vital, dancelike “In/Ex-change.” And Mr. Dargel sang his “What Might Have Been,” a characteristically quirky overview of dysfunctional relationships.

The Tribeca New Music Festival continues through June 10 at various locations; tnmf.net.

Started in 2001 by Preston Stahly, a composer and the executive and artistic director of the New York Art Ensemble, the TRIBECA NEW MUSIC FESTIVAL has become one of the city’s most inviting contemporary-classical events. Last year this scrappy series outgrew its longtime home at the Flea Theater in TriBeCa, establishing an uptown beachhead at Merkin Concert Hall. Celebrating its 10th anniversary this year, the festival makes an initial splash in two events at Merkin this week, followed by concerts in Brooklyn and Chelsea in subsequent weeks. The opening program on Monday features the indefatigable and eclectic string quartet Ethel, reviving an ambitious recent work by Corey Dargel and unveiling premieres by Randall Woolf, Anna Clyne, Matt Marks and Judd Greenstein, among others. And Thursday’s concert includes two groundbreaking bands built around the electric guitar: the protean guitar quartet Dither and the dreamy mixed consort Redhooker. 8 p.m. Monday and Thursday, Merkin Concert Hall, 129 West 67th Street, Manhattan, (212) 501- 3330, kaufman-center.org; $25-$30.

New Portraits of Grief and Wanderlust
By VIVIEN SCHWEITZER

Chamber music concerts focusing on contemporary works often attract small audiences. But the organizers of the Tribeca New Music Festival needed to find a larger space this year after events sold out during the last two seasons at the Flea Theater downtown.

The four-event festival began on Saturday evening at Merkin Concert Hall with an engaging concert by the stellar Jack Quartet, whose young members are vigorous and committed purveyors of new fare. Preston Stahly, the artistic director of the New York Art Ensemble, which presents the festival, hosted the event, during which each composer spoke briefly about his or her work.

The success of the festival, which was founded in 2001, no doubt stems both from high-quality performances and from its eclectic, anti-elitist “avant pop” programming ethos. The New York Art Ensemble’s Web site (nyae.org) says: “Old academic habits die hard, and many students today are still getting caught in the old ‘my way or the highway’ mind-set. Much of academia still lives in denial.”

There was nothing academic about the visceral program on Saturday, which opened with Jeff Myers’s striking “Dopamine,” a harmonically rich work written during what Mr. Myers called 10 days of “ravenous composing.” Insistent cello motifs underpinned melodies in the upper strings, punctuated by energetic outbursts and elegiac passages.

Tribeca New Music Festival
The JACK Quartet opened the 2010 Tribeca New Music Festival with performances of music by Lisa Bielawa, David Crowell, Shawn Jaeger, Jeff Myers, Chris Rogerson and Mick Rossi at Merkin Concert Hall on Saturday night.

There was a sense of Shostakovichian paranoia in the first movement of Mick Rossi’s String Quartet No. 3, which came next. The cello had an athletic workout during the first movement, full of frantic, scurrying figures. The repetitive second movement long outstayed its welcome; perhaps reflecting Mr. Rossi’s background as a frequent collaborator with Philip Glass, descending string motifs recurred incessantly over viola pizzicatos.

Chris Rogerson won the New York Art Ensemble’s 2010 competition for composers 21 and younger for his well-made String Quartet No. 1, here in its New York premiere. There were echoes of Bartok in the slashing figures of “Duel,” the vigorous first movement. Passages of haunting beauty in “Hymn,” the solemn second movement, gave way to “Dance,” the lively finale.

The singing traditions of the Old Regular Baptists in Appalachia inspired Shawn Jaeger’s “Wondering Eyes.” Introspective, mournful passages meshed into frantic fiddling in the evocative work, which received its premiere here.

Lisa Bielawa based “The Trojan Women,” an expressive quartet, on a score she wrote for a production of Euripides’ tragedy of the same name. JoAnne Akalaitis, the director, asked Ms. Bielawa to compose music that reflected different types of grief.

So “Hecuba,” the first movement, unfolds with stately sorrow. “Cassandra,” the second, dissolves into anguished intensity, and “Andromache,” the finale, delves into introspective pathos.

The concert ended with David Crowell’s cinematographic and Minimalist “Open Road,” an inspired work that evoked Mr. Crowell’s frequent road trips out West.

The Jack Quartet performed with dedication and understanding throughout the evening.

The next concert in the Tribeca New Music Festival is on Monday evening at Merkin Concert Hall, 129 West 67th Street, Manhattan; (212) 501-3330; www.tnmf.net.