It has been 30 years since David Byrne yelped “Don’t touch me, I’m a real live wire,” in the Talking Heads’ most famous song, “Psycho Killer,” and he remains an elusive and eccentric figure. But, unlike some of his contemporaries from the Bowery scene of the late 1970s, Mr. Byrne is anything but reclusive. If that looked like him at a high-end downtown grocery store the other day, it probably was. He was the guy whose fashionable shock of gray hair made him stand out at the Arcade Fire show at Webster Hall last January. And he is always one of the idiosyncratically dressed attendees at art openings and film events throughout the city.

In other words, Mr. Byrne has adapted to the life of a culturally savvy New Yorker, enthusiastically indulging his interests and alerting his still devoted fans to whatever they might be.

Not reclusive, but certainly elusive. Just as the Talking Heads were wellspring of diverse sounds and innovative noises, Mr. Byrne’s numerous solo projects and collaborations since that legendary group disbanded 19 years ago have been very hard to pin down.

This week may offer the best opportunity to connect the disparate dots in Mr. Byrne’s musical career. Between Thursday and Sunday, he is the focus of Carnegie Hall’s Perspectives Series, for which he will perform or curate a series of four shows that spans more than 20 years of his career and focuses on two of his most passionate current interests.

On Thursday night at Zankel Hall, Mr. Byrne will present music from “The Knee Plays,” his 1985 collaboration with the award-winning avant-garde theater director Robert Wilson, who is best known for “Einstein on the Beach,” his 1976 collaboration with the composer Phillip Glass. Mr. Byrne’s music from “The Knee Plays” is admirably diverse. It’s a collection of originals, comprised of gospel evergreens and Bulgarian folk songs arranged for brass and percussion. “It’s a strange musical mélange,” Mr. Byrne said in a statement. “The swinging brass and percussions sometimes become mesmerizing and trance-like.”

Mr. Byrne wrote the music after being inspired by New Orleans’s Dirty Dozen Brass Band, and he has retained a fondness for brass bands since. Two years ago, at the Summerstage show that concluded a solo tour, he performed with McCullough Sons of Thunder, a Harlem-based trombone ensemble.

Friday evening’s performance will take place on the Perlman stage at Carnegie’s Stern Auditorium and showcase the emerging genre of freak folk (though the hall’s programming notes calls it experimental folk). The featured performers include Devendra Banhart, Cibelle, Vashti Bunyan, Adem, CocoRosie, and Vetiver. Mr. Banhart’s spare, vaguely psychedelic music defined this genre on discs like 2002’s “Oh Me Oh My” and 2004’s “Niño Rojo.” He tackled weighty matters but worked around the traditional — and sometimes tired — podium of classic folk.

Ms. Bunyan is a 1960s British folkie who recorded about an hour’s worth of idiosyncratic songs before retiring for more than three decades. In one of pop music’s most unique stories, Ms. Bunyan, disillusioned with the record business, left London in a horse-drawn wagon in 1968 on a journey to the Hebrides, with the ultimate goal of meeting folk icon Donovan on the Isle of Skye. She wrote songs along the way, and in 1969 she recorded her only full-length album, “Just Another Diamond Day.”

During Ms. Bunyan’s absence, her music developed a cult following and she returned two years ago with a disc of new material, “Lookaftering” (DiCristina). Cibelle began in the São Paulo dance scene but quickly established her own musical agenda, namely spare, often dark songs sung in a combination of Portuguese and English with odd little accents that create a sense of intimacy and whimsy. Her most recent disc, “The Shine of Electric Dried Leaves” (Six Degrees), was one of last year’s most impressive albums. Several of these performers recently toured England together, so Mr. Byrne asked them to figure out ways to make the evening flow so it didn’t feel fractured by numerous set changes.

On Saturday night, Mr. Byrne will present “Here Lies Love,” a collaboration between his band and the DJ/producer Norman Cook, known professionally as Fatboy Slim. The work is a song cycle based on the life of former Filippina first lady Imelda Marcos, and the title is what she has said she wants written on her tombstone. Mr. Byrne premiered the work last year in Australia in a venue with no seats, though the audience in the Stern Auditorium will be expected to maintain standard decorum. Mr. Byrne wrote in his journal at www.davidbyrne.com that he was thrilled that the crowd was dancing by the end of the performances. Most of his performances mix a few older pieces — even a handful of Talking Heads songs — into his set to balance the lack of familiarity with the new material, but “Here Lies Love” will be entirely new to most of the audience. Mr. Byrne is tweaking the music slightly to add a small orchestra to the final tunes in the cycle.

Sunday night’s show returns the series to Zankel for a performance titled “One Note,” perhaps the most ambitious of the four concerts. The event features Alarm Will Sound, the forward-looking chamber ensemble that played the music of the electronic pioneer Aphex Twin during the 2005 Lincoln Center Festival; Haale, a Persian guitarist and vocalist whose work borders on post-rock, and French singer Camille.

“An extremely wide variety of music has as its center a single tone or note,” Mr. Byrne has said about the organizing concept behind this show. “It could be an A or a B-flat, but in many kinds of music — from Mississippi blues to contemporary classical — there is a constant tone, either played or implied, and all the other textures and melodies revolve around this tone.” Each performer will present music built around this theme.

Post-rock, big beat, orchestras, freak folk, and brass bands — it’s all in week’s work for David Byrne, which may be why in strict taxonomical terms, his musical interests are so hard to define as the years go by. If there is a unifying quality or concept behind it, these shows may just offer a window looking in. Mr. Byrne has an eclectic musical palette favoring ecstatic forms, but at his core is something serene and contemplative, like the freak folk and the chamber ensembles. He is a quiet, quirky man in relentless pursuit of music that dislodges him from that core.

mjohnson@nysun.com