As anniversaries go, the silver 25th usually gets more attention than the later 30th. But, founded in 1976, the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble was in no form to celebrate five years ago. With poor attendance, low morale and financial troubles during the bumpy transition from its founder David Stock to new artistic director Kevin Noe, it was a time for survival, not festivities.

	Cory West Associate conductor Brett Mitchell leads cellist Victoria Bass, pianist Danny Spiegel and flutist Lindsey Goodman in the premiere of Jeffrey Nytch's "... and the wind spoke." Click photo for larger image. Related articles PNME season schedule includes 'major' commissions and group's first CD Lists that tell the PNME story

Since then, the group has turned its fortunes around, and is flourishing in its innovative summer festival season on the South Side. It just announced its 30th-anniversary lineup for this summer, when it continues its theatrical bent and even dares to take on an avant-garde sacred cow by Schoenberg.

Bravado abounds now, making it easier to look back at those troubled times and that iffy beginning.

Take it from the top

In 1975, Stock was a far cry from the well-known local figure he is today. The composer had moved back to Pittsburgh and was out of work, underplayed and a little desperate.

"I had no prospects and three kids," he says. "I went around to everyone in music in Pittsburgh and said I wanted to start a new music ensemble, and everyone said I was crazy, [but] I couldn't afford not to do it."

At the time, contemporary composers were in the throes of the biggest public relations crisis they had faced since the death of Beethoven (still felt to a lesser extent today). Hardly a concertgoer could be found who actually liked the academic rigor of most 12-tone and avant-garde new music. Most contemporary ensembles were founded by composers simply to get their works played because orchestras weren't programming them. The last thing one would expect to have worked in the traditional environment of Pittsburgh in the '70s would be a group dedicated to performing a variety of new music.

Stock found a supporter in Jack Sommers, the former WQED-FM station manager.

"He took us under his wing and helped us keep going," says Stock. Getting musicians was another issue. "It was the beginning of the freelance scene in Pittsburgh, which eventually led to the Benedum Orchestra."

In those heady early days, Stock frequently found himself treading water.

"I was doing everything myself in the beginning" he says. "There were all kinds of zigzags along the way."

Things got easier when he was able to hire Eva Tumiel-Kozak as executive director, especially as Stock was landing teaching posts, such as his present one at Duquesne University.

Threadbare and penny-pinching -- Stock estimates his salary was under $1,000 that first year -- PNME rose for its first concert, at the Chatham College Chapel in spring of 1976. It was, and is, a small collective of musicians.

Momentum builds

The following year, Stock started a series at Chatham, and the zigs and zags continued, including having a concert in February 1977 postponed because of an energy-crisis crackdown.

"I had worked so hard to get this going, and then the weather was against me!"

Soon after, Stock put out a national call for scores, which brought in an astonishing 300 manuscripts, some by then-graduate students like Christopher Rouse and Libby Larsen.

The momentum continued to build, leading to two new music festivals, in 1986 and 1992, and an eventual move to the Jewish Community Center in Squirrel Hill. But then the road started to get uncertain again. After Stock retired in spring of 1999, the group first hired conductor Gil Rose to succeed Stock, but a confrontation over auditioning caused him to leave, forcing PNME to use guest conductors in 1999-2000. The ensemble was at its lowest point.

"The group had some difficult times," says Stock. "The transition was bumpier than it should have been. Eventually Kevin Noe came on board."

Just say 'Noe'

Then a conductor at Duquesne University, Noe quickly realized that PNME needed a new direction. "I thought, 'There has got to be a better way; we can do more than this,'" says Noe. This thinking was spurred not only by the ensemble's particular situation, but also by a general vision for a more theatrical presentation of music, one engaging the modern patron.

"I had the desire to make concerts an event," says Noe, who started experimenting with making performances more continuous. Prior to this, PNME concerts behaved like any orchestra's or quartet's. The group played a work, got applause, then stopped the momentum by breaking before the next work.

Noe's idea was to make the experience more flowing. Even as the audience is applauding one work, a new work (or a transition to it) has begun. Later, he introduced short videos, poetry and theater pieces in these moments -- "I wanted to harness the theater."

The group effectively uses lighting and even adopted "team" colors -- lime green and black -- which have caught on with its audience.

The shift wasn't easy. "I took an enormous amount of flak for it, but the prize is the concerts we have now. My job was to make the concerts great, and I couldn't do that in the other format."

Move to summer

These artistic innovations paled compared to Noe and former executive director Michelle Greenlaw's proposal to move the season to the summer, long thought of as a dormant period for classical music in Pittsburgh.

"Had the first summer season failed, it would probably have meant the end of the organization," says managing director Jeffrey Nytch. The group first went to the Hazlett Theater on the North Side and, since 2004, has called City Theatre on the South Side home.

"I would run into people in the summer, and everyone would say it will never work, there is no one in the summer. I [too] was of the big doubters of the summer move," says Stock. "They have my blessing to say, 'We told you so.' But I am thrilled that it has worked. They got a new audience and kept some of the old. That is what needed to be done."

Just as risky was the decision to hire musicians from outside Pittsburgh, essentially replacing PNME's longtime local freelance orchestra. A nationwide audition supplanted the informal local selections Stock had been doing for years, and it resulted in a group of musicians from around the country who fly in for the six or so weeks of the season.

Musically, the group gelled rather quickly, but audiences took a while. "Last year I think we really turned the corner, where the question of whether we were going to survive was not on the table, finally," says Nytch. When PNME doubled its concerts last summer, it was surprised that it also doubled its audience, from 600 to 1,200.

"I was concerned that the hall would look empty ... but it exploded."

With a strong lineup of compositions, a new commission on every program and a recording in the works this summer, PNME is not just celebrating its 30th as if it were its silver anniversary, it is setting the foundation for planning its 40th and beyond.