Imagine if Bach were a student at Stanford. Late at night, he’s rocking out. The stereos vibrate with staccato beats, while his violin chimes with a churchlike aria. His wig flies across the dorm room floor. His head bangs. He trips over old records of Led Zeppelin and jazz. As we pass the halls, what would it sound like? A cacophony! But even dissonant and erratic, the sounds are so skillfully stirred that they somehow make sense.

This is precisely how the Meridian Arts Ensemble stirred things up in Dinkelspiel Auditorium on Sunday afternoon. Five brass players and one percussionist from New York kept the audience spellbound with the interweaving of both familiar and unfamiliar sounds. For example, the first piece, “Ocho por Radio” (1933) contained a recognizable Latin American pulse, with mariachi tunes and maraca shakers. Then, somehow, the trumpet emerged with a rhapsody like the tunes of Doris Day. As soon as the ear was willing to latch onto the melody of Doris Day, a slow sonorous snare drum crept in. The cheerful Doris Day was gone, and the patriotic grief of the drumbeat took over.

The showstopper was “Magnetic North” (2006) by Mark Applebaum (Associate Professor of Composition and Theory here at Stanford). The piece was as much visual as audio, from the moment Applebaum entered the cluttered stage with his wild, dark, curly mane. The mad professor poked his concoction, the “mouseketier.” An instrument of his creation, it looked like “ET” with its antenna, maze of wires, wheels and sticks, all connected to a laptop.

The Ensemble players behind him, with their gleaming trumpets, horn, tuba and trombone, occasionally smacked their lips, bent over to tap their Pellegrino bottles, and hurled out a Kung fu “Huh!” They made an exaggerated look at their wristwatches and counted loudly, “47...48.”

The “mouseketier” instrument made noises like birds fluttering around their cages, the echoes of galaxies or the stomach gurgling inside the human body. In the middle of the piece, Applebaum bolted to his feet. Suddenly, he was the conductor. He pointed up, pointed down and then flicked his middle finger before resuming his seat behind the “mouseketier” contraption.

The horn ranted off with a series of urgent calls. Then the trumpet player stood up to debate. His eyebrows jumped up and down as he bounced with his trumpet clucking away breathlessly, before he stuck the instrument between his legs and flicked his finger about.

During the intermission, the composer’s score was displayed at the edge of the stage. It looked more like splatters by Joan Miró than a sheet of music notation. Applebaum explained that this “evocative pictograph could be interpreted rigorously, consulted casually or ignored completely.”

As a nice antithesis to Applebaum, Stanford graduate student Per Bloland introduced the world premiere of his “Stillas” (2007), as “almost the opposite.” He advised the audience to “dive into the sound. Let it wash past you. Listen to the way the notes rub.” This piece was comprised of quartertones (as Bloland explained, quartertones are the sounds in between conventional notes. They don’t exist on a piano, but agile lips can find them on wind instruments). If Applebaum’s piece had been a circus of alarm bells, Bloland’s piece was reduced to the singular peal of one bell, extracted and stretched out in a zen-like trance. The strange sounds were thus distilled into a meditation, lulled along by sweet bangs on the vibraphone.

Another piece to mention was “Corpus” (2007), inspired by Bach’s music for church on Sunday, reconstructed to take us through genres of the 21st century. The jazz drums and repetitive phrases formed a mixed soundtrack of “Westside Story” meets Batman meets Disney.

All in all, the musicians slapped balloons, hung over quartertones, flicked each other off and bellowed notes that rubbed with intense friction. With all the recognizable and unrecognizable pitches, melodies and arrangements, the enchanted audience member asks himself, “Why isn’t all this a complete descent into discord? Why did my ears reach for the next sound, rather than recoil in shock? What made it music, rather than just noise?”

Horn player Daniel Grabois commented, “We feel most strongly for music of today. But every music was once its music of today.” The Ensemble has a strong foundation in Bach, Frank Zappa and classical music, yet they are completely willing to be experimental and improvisational with the likes of Bloland and Applebaum.

Applebaum admitted in his composition that the musicians are “called upon individually to perform awkward, mercurial passages” and “squeeze an overabundance of roles into a modest duration.” This hodgepodge was successful, however, because he valued his players “for their fidelity, not their exactitude.” So for the same reason we press our ears closer to hear the wild romping of our imaginary young Bach, we are lured into this jungle of sound. The bold and brazen brass players are inspired by tradition but also not afraid of striking their own pitches. They are not loyal to any one style or harmony but, rather, loyal to the spirit of the music. They plunge headfirst into the atonalities, and they play with agile abandon.