No, their repertoire does not include Also sprach Zarathustra by Richard Strauss. Not yet, anyway.

And yes, they know what year this is.

For 14 years, a Swarthmore-based professional ensemble has been leading concert audiences on an odyssey of discovery to the farthest reaches of new music. Along the way, this starship of musical enterprise has made its name, Orchestra 2001, a trusted brand among musicians, critics, and music fans. They’re not about to change it.

Founded in 1988 by James Freeman—conductor, pianist, double bass player, and Daniel Underhill Professor of Music at the College—Orchestra 2001 consists of a core group of 15 musicians from the Philadelphia area, a number that can double when necessary. On occasion, as when the ensemble performed Polish composer Henryk Górecki’s Symphony No. 3 last March, some student string players from the College get into the act.

From the orchestra’s inception, the College has provided it with office space and performing dates in Lang Concert Hall—no small thing, as anybody would know who has ever needed the use of Swarthmore’s facilities. The ensemble always gives credit to Swarthmore in its programs, no matter where it performs.

Ever since he founded the group in 1988, Freeman has dedicated its concerts to the proposition that listening to new music should be as pleasurable and rewarding as reading a new book or watching a new movie. “New music is as powerful and beautiful as music by Mozart or Beethoven," he says, “and it can be as romantic as anything written in the 19th century."

That philosophy has taken Orchestra 2001 on an odyssey of its own, from Lang Concert Hall to the Kimmel Center (Phila-delphia’s new downtown venue for the performing arts) and abroad to Russia and England. Next June, they are adding a tour of Spain to that list.

This orchestral spacecraft’s course has passed through the recording studio, resulting in four CDs of music by American composers on the respected new-music label CRI. More disks are on the way. Record critics have welcomed these releases with verdicts such as “outstanding performances," “rewarding," and (dear to Freeman's heart) “accessible." It’s not hard to hear why. Combining the lively acoustics of Lang with colorful playing—and dynamics that range from a whisper to a hair-raising fortissimo—these disks are a treat for the ear.

The recordings document the orchestra’s ongoing relationships with a wide variety of present-day composers, emphasizing Americans and particularly composers from the Philadelphia area. On them, Scottish-born Thea Musgrave and Russian-born David Finko, now working in America, rub shoulders with such American originals as Steven Stucky, Joseph Schwantner, Aaron Jay Kernis, Gerald Levinson (a Swarthmore faculty member since 1977), and David Crumb.

But surely the favorite uncle of Orchestra 2001 is David Crumb’s father, George Crumb, whose evocative and colorful music has brought him a Pulitzer Prize and many other honors as well as admiration around the world. George Crumb is, among other things, the most celebrated composer who lives and works in Media, Pa. In October, the orchestra will premiere Crumb’s Unto the Woods, a new work based on Appalachian mountain tunes and written especially for the ensemble.

James Freeman has participated in premieres and first recordings of Crumb’s music for two decades, as pianist, bassist, and even on sitar in Crumb’s Lux Aeterna, in an Orchestra 2001 performance that has been heard both on CD and in a memorable Moscow concert in October 1993, which occurred amid rifle fire in the streets and shelling of the parliament building.

Orchestra 2001 has explored Crumb’s music in depth, programming it with other music that points out its roots—for example, pairing his Ancient Voices of Children with Gustav Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde (“The Song of the Earth")—and linking it to works by younger composers. Crumb’s music appears on three of the orchestra’s four CDs, including one all-Crumb disk. The orchestra’s celebration of Crumb’s 70th birthday in October 1999, with concerts at Lang Concert Hall and in downtown Philadelphia, featured three of the composer’s works and world premieres of seven pieces by other composers, all written for the occasion.

The importance of an ensemble like Orchestra 2001 to the Philadelphia arts scene would be difficult to exaggerate. James Freeman, an active musician in the area since joining the Swarthmore faculty in 1966, says that performance of new music in Philadelphia used to be a hit-or-miss affair, especially during the years between the fading of a group called the Penn Contemporary Players around 1980 and the founding of Orchestra 2001 in 1988.

Looking a little farther back, Freeman says: “This country had a bad relationship to contemporary music in the ’60s and ’70s. I remember that the Philadelphia Orchestra commissioned several new works for the [American] bicentennial in 1976. They were tough to listen to, and the audience didn’t like them."

During that era, the name of Milton Babbitt, the Princeton-based composer, became synonymous in the public mind with knotty and challenging modern music. Babbitt has often visited the Swarthmore campus to give talks and teach. In 1994, the Philadelphia Orchestra commissioned his Transfigured Notes but after repeated attempts gave the piece up as “unplayable." Orchestra 2001 played it. Babbitt wrote to Freeman, expressing his “gratitude for ... your high professionalism, your extraordinary sensitivity to every aspect of the performances."

This incident was a sign of changing times. Musicians have better chops now, and audiences have better “ear chops." Peter Dobrin, music critic of The Philadelphia Inquirer, wrote last March in a review: “Orchestra 2001 has had a lot to do with the city’s evolving sophistication with contemporary music. James Freeman has a canny way of finding holes in the local music scene that didn’t seem to exist until the ensemble came along to plug them with invigorating programs."

Dobrin was reviewing the Kimmel Center performance of Górecki’s Symphony No. 3, a mesmerizing, quasi-minimalist piece that is better known as a million-selling hit record of a few years back (with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and soprano Dawn Upshaw) than as a staple of the orchestral repertoire. On March 2, Maureen O’Flynn, who has sung at the Metropolitan Opera and La Scala in Milan, was the soloist with Orchestra 2001’s performance of the symphony.

Freeman’s goal is to take his guerrilla ensemble and liberate the Kimmel Center with new music. He says he lobbied to have Orchestra 2001 named one of the Center’s constituent organizations, along with the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Pennsylvania Ballet, and other major players. “It’s where important things happen, so it’s where you have to be," Freeman says.

But Kimmel Center’s management presented him with the Catch-22 of aspiring artists: You don’t give enough concerts for us to invite you to give concerts.

This was not the answer for Jim Freeman, who during the 1980s, while traveling on summer tours as a double bassist in the Boston Pops, wrote an estimated 150 grant proposals per year to get Orchestra 2001 started. “Write grants all day, perform at night," he says of those summers.

So he hit on the all-American solution to the Kimmel Center problem: Buy your way in. Some eyebrows were raised on the board of Orchestra 2001 when he proposed leaving their nonunion, three-figure rentals in downtown Philadelphia for the Kimmel Center’s Perelman Theater, which could set the orchestra back as much as $6,000 a concert. Freeman won the vote, however, and the orchestra made its Kimmel Center debut on Feb. 2, with the program of Crumb and Mahler. “It had soul," wrote Dobrin, reviewing that concert in the Inquirer. “[Freeman] bet that [the pieces’] shared musical material ... and the theme of re-birth would build upon each other to form a greater emotional experience. He was right."

The all-Polish program at the Kimmel Center followed on March 2, and three concerts are planned there for the 2002-2003 season. “It will give us a major presence downtown, and our concerts at Lang will continue to serve the suburban and college audiences," Freeman says.

He also notes, however, that the concerts at Lang are, like all on-campus College events, open to everyone at no charge. So now Freeman will have to oil up his grant-writing fingers again and rehearse a lot of music to justify his band’s new prominence.

He has recently been in negotiations with the College to reduce his teaching load by half. In personal terms, it’s like giving up your day job. “Sure, it’s a risk," says the 62-year-old Freeman. “You’re cutting your income in half. But when you get older, you find yourself having to decide: Am I really going to do this or not?"

All orchestras depend on star soloists to help sell tickets, and Orchestra 2001 is no exception. People who might not be enticed out of the house to hear “an evening of music by present-day composers" might just be motivated to hear, say, the glamorous, Grammy Award-winning Sharon Isbin play her guitar.

Isbin made her Orchestra 2001 debut last Sept. 22, amid a national crisis. Like most people, she was stunned by the events of Sept. 11; yet she was also scheduled, just 11 days later, to play the well-known Concierto de Aranjuez by Joaquin Rodrigo and the new Concert de Gaudí by Christopher Rouse, at Lang Concert Hall and Trinity Center in Philadelphia. “I said to myself, ‘How can I prepare such difficult music at a time like this?’ I just forced myself to practice and to remember that there is a world beyond all this," she says. “Jim Freeman was very supportive. It was a healing experience for all of us. We focused our energies on making beautiful music, and we played to two packed houses."

Freeman always keeps an eye out for soloists with audience appeal. A performance of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony featured the noted early-music soprano Julianne Baird in an inspired bit of “casting against type." It shared the bill with the award-winning violinist Pamela Frank in the Philadelphia premiere of the Violin Concerto of Ellen Taafe Zwilich.

In May 2000, Peter Schickele ’58 re-turned to Lang to lead the orchestra and soloists in a performance of the recently discovered opera by P.D.Q. Bach The Stoned Guest.

Orchestra 2001 has even ventured into staged opera—beginning with the world premiere of The Black Swan (text and music by Swarthmore faculty members Nathalie Anderson, professor of English literature; Thomas Whitman ’82, assistant professor of music; and stage direction by Sarah Caldwell) in September 1998, and followed last October with two more premieres: another Whitman-Anderson opus, Sukey in the Dark, on a double bill with Naomi in the Living Room by Jonathan Holland and Christopher Durang. Lou Camp in the City Paper found “rich rewards" in this program and concluded: “We have a treasure in Freeman and his colleagues."

Freeman is hoping to be able to spread that treasure around a bit through what he calls “mini-residencies," one- or two-day campus visits that combine performances and chamber-music coaching or classroom sessions. Orchestra 2001 did something like that at Dickinson College several years ago, and last April they went to West Chester University to play music by Larry Nelson, who is a Ville resident and professor of music there.

The Chinese composer-conductor Bright Sheng led Orchestra 2001 in his Two Poems From the Sung Dynasty at concerts in November 2000. He will be back next March, and again the following year, with works inspired by the Silk Road Project, an East-West musical dialogue masterminded by the cellist Yo-Yo Ma.

But, for all his glowing notices and high-profile projects, Jim Freeman knows what he’s up against. “A while ago," he says, “I was in a meeting with a man who does the advertising for a lot of musical organizations. He said, ‘There are several words that are anathema. You must never use them in ad copy. They are “contemporary,” “20th century,” and “American!”’ That about took care of us."

On the other hand, guitarist Sharon Isbin said, “I have to commend Jim, in these times when so many orchestras are cutting back and just trying to survive, for creating such a successful new orchestra."

Don’t count him out.

Journalist and pianist David Wright writes about music from Wellesley, Mass. He was formerly program annotator of the New York Philharmonic.