Although the band is named after Charles Ives, don’t expect to hear any of the pioneering modernist’s scores when the Ives Ensemble visits Vancouver next week. Instead, prepare yourself for something that could more properly be called the Feldman Group, as two of Morton Feldman’s masterpieces will be prominently featured.

Chamber-music scores by both composers are part of the 13-piece band’s core repertoire, along with pieces from their fellow American John Cage. But Feldman has long held a particular fascination for the Dutch new-music ensemble’s John Snijders, who founded the conductorless group in 1986.

“I think I got acquainted with his music when I studied in The Hague, at the conservatory there,” says the 45-year-old pianist, reached by telephone at a Toronto hotel. “That was in the mid-1980s, and being a curious student I spent time in the library delving into scores that might look interesting. That was where I came across Feldman’s music, and at that point he’d only started writing his very long pieces, so I didn’t know those at all. But the shorter ones, the 1970s pieces, struck me as being extraordinarily beautiful.”

Feldman’s music is better experienced than explained, but some of it could be described as a kind of ecstatic minimalism, and much of it unfolds over very long periods of time. Which is presumably why we’ll only hear the second movement of The Viola in My Life when the Ives Ensemble plays at the Scotiabank Dance Centre Thursday (March 5): a full performance clocks in at a relatively compact 40 minutes, while some of his other scores run for up to six hours.

Snijders credits Feldman with changing the way contemporary composers handle duration, tone colour, harmony, and instrumentation. And he doesn’t deny that one of the aims of his group is to spread the word.

“I’m not sure if his [Feldman’s] influence is as big as it might be,” the pianist notes. “I’ve noticed that his music still isn’t that well known with younger composers, but once they get to know it, almost everyone is completely in awe of it. I’ve had so many young composers tell me that after they heard long pieces by Feldman, it completely transformed their way of thinking about music.”

But Feldman isn’t the only composer that the Ives Ensemble will tackle during its Vancouver visit. Also on the bill, as requested by the band’s Canadian hosts, will be Iannis Xenakis’s Plektó.

“I thought that was a good idea,” says Snijders, “because Feldman always said that one of the few composers that he thought wrote music that would really fit into a program with his own was Xenakis.”

As Snijders suggests, Xenakis’s extravagantly kinetic gestures are almost the polar opposite of Feldman’s creeping beauty. Add pieces by England’s Christopher Fox and Ireland’s Gerald Barry—“one of the great geniuses in composing at this moment”, says Snijders—and tonight’s program will undoubtedly tax musicians and listeners alike, but in truly stimulating fashion.