Calder Quartet and Urban Jazz Dance Company

That being the case, it was dismaying how little of the program included dancing. Was the audience in the front able to feel the music through vibrations in the floor? The dancers certainly could as they performed barefoot in front of the quartet, as the yellow Alaskan cedar of Bing’s stage area is a wood of supreme softness and reverberence.

The main work on the program was Beethoven’s vast String Quartet in B-flat Major, Op. 130, including its original finale, the monumental Grosse Fuge. It was an appropriate choice, as Beethoven was entirely deaf by the time he composed it. But only two of the briefer movements were deemed dancelike enough to merit dance accompaniment, although all three of the participating dancers reappeared briefly at the end of the Grosse Fuge. Hunter made appropriate movements, twisting his arms together a lot, for Beethoven’s cavorting second movement Presto, but he and his assistant director Zahna Simon didn’t attempt to replicate the seasick quality of the music in their duet dancing to the fourth movement Danza Tedesca, though a brief moment of breakdancing by Hunter went down well.

The Calder Quartet played the Beethoven with brisk crispness, though without tending to diminish the scale or size of the work the players were undertaking. Throughout the Grosse Fuge’s complex counterpoint, the voicing was remarkably evenhanded, with no instrument dominating the others.

Prior to the Beethoven, Hunter came on stage to perform a brief dance with no sound accompaniment whatever. During this, he led the audience in a sequence of hand movements.

The other fairly large composition of the day was danced to throughout, despite the work being even less explicitly dance music than the Beethoven was. This was the Quartet in Four Parts by John Cage, who earned his place on the program through his romantic partnership and artistic collaboration with the choreographer Merce Cunningham.

Cage is remembered today more as an experimentalist, testing the boundaries of what’s considered music, than as a composer of conventionally-notated works. But he did write some pieces of that kind, particularly early in his career, cultivating a light, transparent, hesitant and fragmented style. Such is his quartet. It went well with the dances presented first by Simon, then by Marissa Head, then by the two as a duet. They danced in different styles, at least to start with, with Simon rolling around a lot while Head essayed variations on the act of walking. At one point during the duet, Simon gave Head a dose of what looked like cardiopulmonary resuscitation, surely for artistic purposes only.

The third and shortest piece of music on the program was “Joy Boy” by the late African American composer Julius Eastman, whose works have been the subject of some special Stanford programs this year. This is a brief piece of held throbbing chords, shifting in a minimalist manner and overlaid with crinkling sounds. No dancing accompanied it.

When there was dancing in this concert, it was attractive, even beautiful, a worthy contribution to the art. As music, the concert was a cool-toned performance with rich and crisp playing, a worthwhile afternoon with a string quartet.