The Meadows Percussion Ensemble offered “An Evening of Percussion” Wednesday.

Audience members filed into Caruth Auditorium around 7:50 p.m., eager to hear avant-garde drum music.

Outside the theater, Meadows percussion Director Jon D. Lee greets oncomers, highly anticipating the crowd’s reaction to a set list of modern works, namely “Ionisation” (1929-1931) by Edgard Varese.

Music from the 1930s might not strike some as “modern,” but Lee begs to differ.

“You have to kind of put it where it was written,” former Meadows alumnus Lee said.

“Ionisation” is not only the first piece of music written for Western percussion, but also one of the first pieces to ignore harmony or melody in favor of timbre and texture.

“It’s unlike anything that’s been written before,” Lee says.

“What other piece of music uses hand-cranked sirens?”

Crowdgoers wowed over the piece’s thick ambience before its end, a ringing bell motif.

“Double Music” (1941), a collaboration between modernist composers John Cage and Lou Harrison, followed with a long drone from a gong before free falling into ominous clanging –— think “Indiana Jones dueling wits with an evil yogi” sort of music.

“Sculpture in Wood” (1995), named by composer Rudiger Pawassar in honor of the marimba continued the melodic ambience of the first two pieces before the rhythms took on a ragtime tone.

The sextet playing “Mass” by John Mackey upped the ante, strumming a xylophone with a cello bow over light key patterns and booming timpani marches.

After the intermission, the eagerly anticipated “Whispered Interior” (2013) by
Composer and Meadows Professor of Composition and Music Theory Lane Harder debuted.

Taking inspiration from Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response videos, “Whispered Interior” is a gentle breeze of nonchalance.

Random sounds pop up now and again — the bicycle wheel rattles, the whooshing of the long, branch like ocean drum, the sizzle of metal scraping wood.

Vocalist Arielle Collier recites poet Wallace Stevens’ “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour” over tapped cello strings and newspapers ripped like weak condoms.

Writing sounds for their own sake was intentional, Harder said.

The odd elements, like the bicycle wheel, were not meant for “interacting, just effect.”

Audience members were pleased with the set list’s eclectic sounds and tones.

“It’s different, I like it,” SMU sophomore Lauren Kennedy said.

The concert ended with “Elements,” the drumming free-for-all written by director of Meadows World Music Ensemble Jamal Mohamed.

Written in the modal style, Mohamed taught his performers basic rhythms for the piece’s opening, but encouraged them to play what came naturally in the middle passages.

“Elements” is jazzy, but wheels freely past any meter, closing the concert to a breezy finish.

The Meadows World Music Ensemble plays Nov. 24 at the Bob Hope Theater.