"One does not ask the stars to assemble in ordered rows, or bacteria to move in step" is how music critic Robin Maconie once described the unique sense of beauty aspired to by Karlheinz Stockhausen and other contemporary composers. Anyone attending this year's New Music Marathon should keep those words in mind.

For Maconie, a former student of Stockhausen and Olivier Messiaen, one key to appreciating contemporary music is understanding the role of 20th-century inventions that "extend the artist's range and scale of vision beyond the ordinary limits of unaided human discrimination." Such inventions will be in no short supply at this year's marathon, which features three-dimensional multichannel sound, a 60-piece amplified orchestra, digitally sampled sounds, tape recorders, phonographs and stunning works of avant-garde film.

Stockhausen moves to center stage for the second performance, which features four works by the composer: "Gesang der Jünglinge," "Kontakte," "Klavierstücke" and "Zyklus." A special audio technique known as "sound projection" will be employed, using a multichannel sound system installation. The performers are all students or associates of Stockhausen: pianist Benjamin Kobler, percussionist Michael Pattmann and electronica whiz Bryan Wolf. Reached on the phone in Pforzheim, Germany, Wolf advised that the word "projection" is not a visual reference, but a concept of sound developed by Stockhausen for live performance of his works in a three-dimensional audio format. The pieces are all from Stockhausen's early, most "radical" period in the 1950s.

Then the Marathon's youngest performers take the stage. Prague's Berg Orchestra boasts many members still in their early 20s, who since 1995 have specialized in presenting works by emerging Czech composers. For the Marathon, they will present a premiere of a work by Petr Wajsar based on the waltz entitled Waltzar. It should be a spunky work for orchestra by a young composer who also works in jazz. Of special interest as well will be Slavomír Hořínka's Širej ahava, which at times has a mystical edge based in part on Jewish melodies evocative of Josefov. The Berg Orchestra will close the set with Michal Nejtek's Nuberg 05', which combines quotations from Beethoven's Symphony No. 1 and Strauss' Viennese waltzes with prerecorded tapes and old phonograph records.