Face the Music, Teenage Alt-Classical Ensemble Joan Jastrebski The composer Nico Muhly, center rear, with members of Face the Music. The group focuses on works from the last 50 years, with an emphasis on the new alt-classical. AT first glance the ensemble setting up in a fifth-floor classroom at the Kaufman Center on West 67th Street in Manhattan seems like any other student group and exactly what you would expect to find in a building that houses two music schools and Merkin Concert Hall. Teenage string and brass players tune their instruments and play fragments of pieces they are working on; saxophonists see to their reeds; percussionists contribute spiritedly to the din; and a guitarist and a bassist quietly pluck figures from the scores on their music stands. Gavin Price The ensemble's director, Jenny Undercofler, who started it in 2005. The group plays music intended, perhaps, for more mature players. But when the conductor, Jenny Undercofler, using a pencil as a baton, leads her Face the Music ensemble through Steve Martland's rhythmically pointed, texturally jagged "Horses of Instruction," you realize that this is not the sort of student orchestra you may remember. It is instead an alternative-universe high school band: a new-music factory that focuses on works written in the last 50 years, with an emphasis on the new alt-classical style. Its musicians, who began studying new music before anyone had told them that it was incomprehensible or unlikable, are thrilled to play it, and their spirit has impressed composers whose music they perform. "Writing for a kids" group is like throwing a pass in football," said Phil Kline, whose "Exquisite Corpses," composed for the adult virtuosos in the Bang on a Can All-Stars, is part of Face the Music's repertory. You don't want to throw it behind them, or too far in front, but so they can reach it. But here was this group working on a piece with a clarinet part written for Evan Ziporyn and a guitar part for Mark Stewart, extraordinary players, and they did a great job. There was no sense of boredom or squirming. They were totally focused and committed. Now in its seventh year Face the Music has 74 members, up from 8 when Ms. Undercofler started it in 2005. It began as a project of the Kaufman Center's Special Music School, a public school for musically gifted children from kindergarten through eighth grade. The school will add grades nine through 12 in 2013. But the group quickly expanded to take in musicians from all over the New York region, from Grades 5 through 12 (roughly, 11 to 17 years old). They attend a three-and-a-half-hour rehearsal at the Kaufman Center every Sunday, and they have a busy concert calendar that has made Face the Music a force in the New York new-music world. In 2011 the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers presented its Aaron Copland Award to Ms. Undercofler and her musicians "for the artistry and passion with which they champion and perform the music of living composers." Since January, Face the Music has performed at the Queens Museum of Art, Lincoln Center's David Rubenstein Atrium, Roulette, St. Malachy's (the Actor's Chapel) and as part of the Ecstatic Music Festival at Merkin Concert Hall. Its busy spring schedule includes a reading of a movement of Steve Reich's Double Sextet at the Kaufman Center on Sunday, a concert at St. Malachy's on Monday, and performances at the Tribeca Music Festival, the Tank, the First Presbyterian Church of Brooklyn and Firehouse Space in Brooklyn in April; and in El Museo del Barrio and outside Merkin, as part of the daylong Make Music New York Festival, in June. Ms. Undercofler's group has few competitors. The Contemporary Youth Orchestra, a 115-player ensemble of 13-to-18-year-olds, based in Cleveland and led by Liza Grossman, is now in its 17th season. It is a conventional orchestra: no guitars, electronics or other indie-classical accouterments. Formerly Known as Classical, a teenage chamber group in San Francisco, explores a repertory similar to Face the Music's. Ms. Undercofler, a pianist trained at the Juilliard School and the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, joined the staff of the Kaufman Center as the music director of the Special Music School in 2004 and started Face the Music as an experiment in 2005 by putting up a poster advertising the group as an after-school new-music club. "It wasn't exactly a prank," Ms. Undercofler said, "but I wanted to see if anyone would sign up. The kids here are very serious, very devoted to their studies, and that first year I got eight kids who were, honestly, misfits or rebels of one kind or another. There were administrative doubts to overcome, said Lydia Kontos, the executive director of the Kaufman Center: "I was very committed to new music at Merkin Hall. But I also felt that a lot of new music sounds like being inside someone's head. One of the great things about Jenny is that she does a lot of deep thinking about what's being done, and she made it so clear to me what the possibilities were for contemporary music from a pedagogical standpoint.