There is a heated, and I believe healthy, debate in this town about contemporary music.

Some critics take the extreme position and state that only modern pieces are relevant and that we should stick Bach, Mozart, and Brahms on some dusty old shelf. To these fashionistas, any idiosyncratic conducting tendencies of our own Lorin Maazel pale in comparison to the outrageous fact that he dares to program the symphonies of Beethoven.

Audiences, meanwhile, tend to vote with their feet, staying away in droves from concerts that feature only music written in the 21st century.The zealous advocates for the contemporary theorize high ticket prices keep people away, but Wednesday night’s Focus Festival concert at the Juilliard School featured free admission – and it would have been very difficult to raise a quorum at the Peter Jay Sharp Theater.

At the conservatory level, there should be no argument. Here the “new and now” has a special place. Students should take an interest in the music of their age, for it will stay with them as a pleasant memory for the rest of their lives. I still listen ecstatically to the pieces written by Maderna, Berio, and Nono. I grew up with this adventurous music and remember how sparse the crowds were for its presentation back in the early 1960s.

Wednesday’s concert was an excellent one and featured pieces with a decided diatonic flavor. Each seemed to hark back to a different composer or school from way back in the 20th century.

“Loin d’ici” (“Far From Here”) was written by Bun-Ching Lam from Macau as a competition piece for flutists. I was particularly impressed with her idea that this type of work, used to evaluate aspirants, should be primarily devoid of technical hurdles, concentrating instead on a singing tone and depth of lyricism. Ravel’s “Syrinx” was the genesis of the piece, and some Debussy also came through.

Sarah Frisof performed the flute part beautifully: She would have been a sure winner of the competition in question. Her lower tones, reminiscent of the alto flute, were lovingly pearshaped, and she displayed an enviable ability to interject the ghostly whistle effects without breaking the melodic line. Her accompanist, Kyung-Eun Na, was confidently strident.

Also on offer was Thomas Ades’s suite of arias from his opera “The Tempest,” transcribed for clarinet, violin, cello, and piano. Mr. Ades has ridden the coattails of Simon Rattle to contemporary superstardom (that is, one one-thousandth of 1% of music listeners have heard of him). Mr. Rattle’s old City of Birmingham Symphony featured his pieces, as has the Berlin Philharmonic.Although Wednesday night’s offering carried a whiff of the Elizabethan madrigal, the composer who came most prominently to the fore was Stravinsky, especially the “Dumbarton Oaks” Concerto.This was pleasant music warmly played.

Cuban composer Keyla Orozco brought us back to reality with her “Nengon Transformation 4,” a work that demonstrated much that is wrong with contemporary fare. Triad. Pause. Triad. Pause. This went on for what seemed like 20 minutes, but was probably only five.There followed a middle section with the insouciant boulevardier spirit of the wind music of Jean Francaix (the piece is for flute, clarinet, and bassoon), some dying duck calls from the clarinet, and a reprise of the opening played slower and ad nauseum.

This music eventually died away, and we were treated to the world premiere of Franghiz Ali-Zadeh’s “Khazar.” If Thomas Ades has Simon Rattle, then Ms. Ali-Zadeh, an Azeri pianist and composer,has the Kronos Quartet. (She will be performing with the group at Zankel Hall on March 26.)

In this Juilliard commission, Ms. Ali-Zadeh demonstrated a highly inventive sense of Russian exoticism – think Mily Balakirev or those very rare chamber works of Rimsky-Korsakov. “Khazar” (the Caspian region) was superb, evocative, earthy. The five participants (Ann Miller and Ariana Kim, violins; Ka Sin Cass Ho, viola; Karen Ouzounian, cello; and Yu-Xi Wang, piano) are all superb, well-coached musicians, though I have to suspect the composer had the Kronos in mind – their unique sound is embedded in this music, so expansive in its sonic descriptions of one of the most spectacularly beautiful regions on the planet.

Mstislav Rostropovich has always been the most famous musician from Baku, but he may be eclipsed going forward if Ms. Ali-Zadeh can develop a wide enough audience for her tonal explorations. She is from another generation than the other composers of the evening; in fact, she was born only a year later than I in the Pleistocene era. She has certainly learned her lessons well. Too bad only a few dozen people witnessed this significant world premiere.