David Kravitz, baritone, as economically astute monk; Frank Kelley, tenor, not so much. (C. Fernsebner)

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Friday night's installment of the Ditson Festival of Contemporary Music was all about text. Whole, grammatical sentences; comprehensible, English, (mostly) well-enunciated; no Italian arias, no liturgical Latin, no repurposed Sanskrit, neither Einstein nor beach—this is not what Bostonist has come to expect from classical music, contemporary or otherwise.

And Bostonist has never seen a tenor struggle to maintain a straight face, but Frank Kelley very nearly succumbed during Richard Beaudoin's "Eunoia Songs" (2004), a clever musical setting of Christian Bök's already-clever experiment with vowels—all five of them, but only one per poem. The audience was less successful in containing its mirth, as Kelley performed daring escapes in Oulipo-brand verbal handcuffs: "Ursus cubs plus Lupus pups hunt skunks / Curs skulk (such mutts lurk: ruff, ruff). Gnus munch kudzu." The score distilled each vowel to its essentials, with short pinpricks of notes for "I," dipping in "U" shapes, gaping open-mouthed at "O" ("...color photos of cocks, boobs, dorks or dongs / Homos shoot photos of foot-long schlongs").

"The Gold Standard" (Scott Wheeler, 2000) was a tiny, drama-free opera in which a (baritone) Buddhist monk attempted to explain American currency to a (tenor) colleague impervious to hypothetical illustration. Fortunately, we happened to be escorted to the ICA by a young man—we'll call him A.B.D. McHarvardpants—who remarked that it was odd to see such characters as economic naïfs, for as we all know from reading Marxist-leaning historian Jacques Gernet, Chinese Buddhist monastic treasuries functioned as primitive banks, lending out their vast stores of cash to the laity on collateral.

We—both Bostonist and A.B.D. McHarvardpants—were nonetheless charmed.

Of the two wordless (and lunar-themed) performances in the set, one had words (only evident in the program) and a theremin (played the the composer, Brian Robison). The other, Barbara White's "My barn having burned to the ground, I can now see the moon" (2008) was mesmerizing in its Boston premiere, gradually paring its glimmering and rumbling down to almost nothing, clusters of ringing piano notes concentrating our attention into one bright, shining point. ("That was really alarming," McHarvardpants told us. "It sounded like something was dying.")

Collage New Music began the second show of the evening with two suspenseful instrumental pieces by Donald Sur before a soprano arrived for Yehudi Wyner's "On this most voluptuous night" (1982). Exquisitely sung by Karyl Ryczek, it was pleasant to the ear but jarring in its use of William Carlos Williams' verse. Vocal embellishments and the forced repetition of lines seemed to work against that back-of-a-napkin brevity that puts Williams' poetry at the opposite end of the bookshelf from the operatic libretto.

The Cantata Singers, who had waited patiently on the bleachers, finally took the stage after half time, to sing Sur's very direct and rich setting of Sonnet 97, moving briskly through Shakespeare's text until picking apart the last line ("...tis with so dull a cheer / That leaves look pale, dreading the winter's near") as if with gorgeous reluctance to let go. The singers and Collage New Music closed with Irving Fine's "Design for October," a wistful song about the end of summer and its attendant bird migrations. Delightful and, like summer, over too soon.