There weren’t any safe spaces away from its force on Thursday night at Santos Party House in Lower Manhattan — the event was called United States of Bass for a reason. Part of the Red Bull Music Academy series of performances, which has been flooding the city with dance music for the last few weeks, it offered both a tactile dance-floor experience and a history lesson.

The D.J. lineup was savvy, mostly a collection of dons of long-gone, diminished or hyperlocal hip-hop tributaries and black dance-music subcultures, the sort that connoisseurs obsess over but that rarely crack mainstream awareness.

These were — and in some cases remain — worlds in which place mattered, when a specific set of musicians and locales created a style that largely stayed put, at least until the Internet got hold of it. There was DJ Magic Mike and his Miami bass, Egyptian Lover and his Los Angeles electro. DJ Assault, from Detroit, played ghettotech; Scottie B, from Baltimore, played Baltimore club. Chicago was represented by two generations: DJ Funk and his classic ghetto house, and DJ Rashad and DJ Spinn playing modern juke.

Ideally, this bill could have served as an opportunity to parse the fine differences among the sounds, though often the bass led with such intensity that to do so in the moment felt meaningless. It was also hampered by each performer’s struggle with whether to be faithful to the sound of his city and genre or to reach out more widely on this bigger stage.

Those who stayed truest to their foundation were the most successful. In the basement DJ Rashad and DJ Spinn played a masterly set of juke music, which is fast, clean, precise and neck-snapping. At around 3:30 on Friday morning, DJ Funk, who’d missed his original slot because of flight delays, took over the turntables from them and transitioned into their shared city’s older sound, ghetto house — or booty house — which is just as fast, but dirty and with more of a kitchen-sink approach to other genres, incorporating snippets of R&B and hip-hop, though not at the price of the style’s lewd chants and rough edges. DJ Funk had the most in common with DJ Assault, who’d earlier brought his vulgar, irresistible ghettotech — the sound of Detroit strip clubs in the late 1990s — to the main stage. (A similar tack was taken earlier by Scottie B, whose Baltimore club was chaotic and wide-ranging; it was the choppiest of the styles on display here, and also among the most raw.)

The first two main-stage performers were, by comparison, veterans. DJ Magic Mike is a pioneer of Miami bass music, the low-end-intense hip-hop subgenre that has the advantage of having some national hits, like those by 2 Live Crew. He didn’t rely on them, though, and needlessly brought in other styles to his mix, which felt like a violation. Egyptian Lover, whose important records date to the mid-1980s, stayed truer to the viscous electrofunk that helped give early Los Angeles hip-hop a signature sound.

As is the current norm, most of the D.J.’s used the computer program Serato, meaning they didn’t have to bring a crate of vinyl. But Egyptian Lover mixed directly off records handed to him one at a time by an associate, and after a while he came out front to rap along to his songs, slow and nasty lines that were harsh against his music’s inherent smoothness.

The lone straight-ahead rapper on the bill was Big Freedia, from New Orleans, who makes bounce music, that city’s signature frenetic hip-hop subscene, and who was ecstatic and tireless, performing one ode to the derrière after the next, often with crowd participation. (Booking someone like DJ Jubilee would have been more in keeping with the night’s theme, though.)

Abstractly speaking, the glue that should have held the night together was Afrika Bambaataa, who could reasonably be dubbed the father of all the scenes and sounds represented at this show. In mid-1970s New York, he was one of the D.J.’s who reached far and wide, bridging funk and electro and soul and Krautrock and plenty more, setting the table for hip-hop’s eclecticism. Without him, none of these styles would have had a template to work from.

But Afrika Bambaataa had perhaps missed the memo about the night’s mission, or, at a minimum, is far gone from his pioneering days. For the first half of his set, he was received enthusiastically but looked catastrophically bored, playing a largely characterless set of electro with bits of Nirvana and MC Hammer mixed in. He opened up more widely later on, taking in Latin funk, 1990s club music and, garishly, a touch of dubstep. He didn’t tell a story about then, and he didn’t tell a story about now — only about how easily you can get lost on the path in between.

Far from my dictionary’s fling, “unrestrained pleasures or dissipation,” this was a genteel affair, as you would ordinarily expect of an evening of violin, two viols and harpsichord. And the first half in particular, a procession of works in minor keys, was sobersided until the end, when Dietrich Buxtehude’s D minor Trio Sonata (Op. 1, No. 6) afforded some (relatively speaking) zany twists and dynamic contrasts.

Not that the individual works were less than good, and the performances were often excellent. Repast — Amelia Roosevelt, violinist; John Mark Rozendaal, violist da gamba; and Avi Stein, harpsichordist — was joined in shifting alignments by a second gamba player, Sarah Cunningham. The exposure the program gave to two lesser-known 17th-century English masters, Matthew Locke and Christopher Simpson, was most welcome. Locke was represented by two intimate suites (in E minor, from the set “For Several Friends”; and in A minor, from “The Flatt Consort, for My Cousin Kemble”), weaving together evanescent and highly stylized little turns on dances.

Far more substantial were Simpson’s contributions: Divisions on a Ground in G, with the two gamba players facing off brilliantly, and “The Spring” from “The Seasons,” with all hands on deck. “The Seasons,” a series of four fantasia-suites, tries to capture the mood and perhaps some of the atmosphere of each season but with none of the pictorial aspirations of Vivaldi’s later “Four Seasons.”

“The Spring,” a quarter-hour work in three movements, Fancy, Ayre and Galliard, did not depart greatly from the prevailing serenity of the rest of the program. You wanted to know what Simpson might have made of a summer storm or a wintry chill, even in abstraction.

Mr. Stein, one of the hardest-working and most valuable performers on the New York early-music scene, gave solo performances of a Suite in A minor by Johann Jakob Froberger, “Lament Composed in London to Relieve Melancholy” (see what I mean about fling?), and a full-bodied Prelude in G minor by Buxtehude.

In addition, the performers offered an improvisation in each half of the program, drawing thread from the Baroque music at hand but venturing far beyond the period, even into modern modes of expression. The goal seemed modest enough, and so were the results.

Last things first, since the concert ended with an imposing traversal of Peter Maxwell Davies’s “Eight Songs for a Mad King,” a harrowing 1969 portrayal of King George III’s descent into madness, based on poems by Randolph Stow and melodies from a mechanical organ the king once owned. Still startling despite its age, the piece is encountered relatively infrequently, mostly because it demands a vocalist willing to do absurd, terrifying and potentially dangerous things with his voice.

Here, that singer was John Taylor Ward, a tall, wiry baritone, willowy and piteous one moment, bug-eyed and frothing the next. Backed by a restless soundscape of twisted early-music parodies (Handel and Haydn most clearly), nervous chatters and birdlike twitters, Mr. Ward stalked the stage in a robe and pajamas, expertly booming and screeching through the work’s disjointed reminiscences.

Most of Mr. Davies’s staging suggestions were bypassed — no woodwind musicians in cages here. But the players all made efforts to enhance the nervous mood of the performance through gesture and expression, and the climactic moment, when the king grabs a violinist’s instrument and smashes it onstage, retained its sense of shock.

The program opened with Mr. Davies’s “Seven Renaissance Scottish Dances,” dispatched with an appropriately loose, folksy vigor. For “Volgendo il ciel” and “Movete,” from Monteverdi’s “Madrigali Guerrieri e Amorosi,” Cantata Profana became a stylish early-music ensemble, abetted by a lyrical tenor, Scott Mello, and a harmonious vocal quintet.

Monteverdi left a hole in the piece with instructions for the insertion of a dance. Jacob Ashworth — a violinist and conductor, and the artistic director of Cantata Profana — selected a courante by Susan Kander, a contemporary composer and Mr. Ashworth’s mother.

Representing Handel, a favorite of King George’s, was a blithe account of the Trio Sonata in B flat (Op. 5, No. 7), in which Mr. Ashworth and another violinist, Holly Piccoli, played with diligent attention to period style.

This has been a defining attribute of the New Amsterdam Singers, a skilled 70-voice choir, which ended its 45th season with a concert on Thursday night at St. Ignatius of Antioch Episcopal Church on the Upper West Side, conducted by its music director, Clara Longstreth.

The chorus boasts an impressive list of premieres and commissions. But some of the same names keep coming up. What could be more natural?

Two of those regulars were performed on this program, titled “Premiere! American Poetry Settings.” One was Ronald Perera, who was on hand for the New York premiere of “The Star in the Pail,” six songs set to whimsical poems by David McCord. Though the texts are pretty light, Mr. Perera’s pleasure in the fanciful words comes through in his appealing, quirky music, which the choristers sang with rich sound and liveliness.

Mr. Perera spoke to the audience about his 20-year association with Ms. Longstreth and the chorus, which has resulted in six major works. This is “no longer a trial marriage,” he said.

Another regular, Matthew Harris, had two works on Thursday’s program. I especially liked “Three Plums,” harmonically pungent settings of poems by William Carlos Williams. The chorus also offered Mr. Harris’s undulant, fresh and sometimes fractured “Fantasy on La Bamba.”

Ms. Longstreth is known for her imaginative programs, and this one included strong performances of works by William Schuman and Richard Rodney Bennett, presented by the ensemble’s smaller chamber chorus. On this night, notably, there were also two young composers who are newcomers to the Singers.

Alex Weiser, a New Yorker who studied at Yale University, was drawn to “Travelers,” an enigmatic poem by a friend, Laura Marris, for an a cappella work of the same title, first performed at Yale in 2011. Mr. Weiser captured both the specific and elusive qualities of the poetic imagery in his compelling music, which sometimes breaks down a phrase and repeats the words, as if to get at the meaning. The urgent performance was led by Max Blum, the chorus’s excellent assistant conductor.

Elizabeth Lim, currently a doctoral candidate at the Juilliard School, spoke of why she was drawn to Willa Cather’s poem “Paradox,” which is a reimagined take on the characters of Shakespeare’s “Tempest.” At times Ms. Lim’s music, which is full of crunchy chords and eerily sustained vocal lines, makes a mysterious jumble of the words through fitful, overlapping phrases. A highly charged piano part, played vividly by Pen Ying Fang, brings dramatic sweep to the piece.

It seems likely that Ms. Lim and Mr. Weiser may be added to the roster of composers the choir champions.

A cultural goddess in the Philippines, Ms. Salonga, now 42, said she spent much of her time there nowadays but is regularly called back to the United States for work. Her current project, which is eyeing a run on Broadway, is a musical, “Allegiance,” developed by the actor George Takei, about a Japanese-American family interned during World War II. On first listen, one number from that show, “Higher,” written by Jay Kuo, was an inspirational ballad that follows the usual climb-the-mountain formula of would-be showstoppers.

Ms. Salonga’s program, titled “Back to Before,” is partly a tribute to her idols Barbra Streisand and Ella Fitzgerald. In the first half, she concentrated on standards that included “The Song Is You,” “Manhattan” and “How Long Has This Been Going On? — all delivered with an almost machinelike perfection. Her performance was matched by the facility of her musicians, the pianist Jeff Harris, the bassist John Miller and the guitarist Jack Cavari, who were playing arrangements by Larry Yurman.

“Greatest Love of All,” Whitney Houston’s early hit, received an unusually strong and focused interpretation whose message of unapologetic self-reliance resonated with Ms. Salonga’s show business biography. “I Won’t Mind,” a woman’s protective love song to a child who’s not hers, written by Jeff Blumenkrantz, Annie Kessler and Libby Saines, and a medley of Stephen Sondheim’s “So Many People” and “Loving You” demonstrated her comfort in a more intimate, psychologically subtle mode.

Since then, marriage (to Rick Montalbano, the drummer in her trio) and motherhood (they have a 5-year-old son) have changed everything, and Ms. Monheit, now 35, has matured into a confident, expressive interpreter eager to take chances. Her finest performances on Tuesday evening at Birdland were of familiar songs that she turned into heartfelt reflections on motherhood. The Buffy Sainte-Marie ballad “Until It’s Time for You to Go” became an emotional anticipation of a child’s growing up and eventually leaving home, out of which she wrung a complicated mixture of exhilaration and anxiety.

Two Beatles songs — “Golden Slumbers” and “The Long and Winding Road” — were woven into an extended lullaby, infused with passages of wordless singing that suggested a fantasy of a sleeping child who grows up and leaves home but eventually returns to the nest.

Although Ms. Monheit can swing, she is more temperamentally suited to ballads like “Two Lonely People,” a Bill Evans melody with lyrics by Carol Hall that describes a married couple who “once loved and were caring” but for whom the flame has long died. Now they sit “silently staring, their eyes looking coldly ahead.” Crooning a song that suggests the darker side of Jacques Brel, Ms. Monheit cast a funereal chill.

Her longstanding attachment to Brazilian music was reflected in two Ivan Lins songs, “Depende De Nós” and “A Gente Merece Ser Feliz,” sung in Portuguese, and a brisk, happy version of “Waters of March.” Her pensiveness was ultimately balanced by the relaxed ebullience of a performer who has nothing left to prove.

On Tuesday evening at Le Poisson Rouge Mr. Tao performed works for solo piano from his latest CD, “Voyages,” which will also be released on his birthday. While there was much to admire in his confident and sensitive playing, it was above all the program, with pieces by Rachmaninoff and Ravel, Meredith Monk and Mr. Tao himself, that conveyed the scope of his probing intellect and openhearted vision.

The theme of his album and Tuesday’s concert was motion, both in the literal sense of traversing distance and in the swooping virtual movement of dreams, which inspired Ravel’s haunting “Gaspard de la Nuit” and Mr. Tao’s own “vestiges.”

The program opened with Ms. Monk’s brief “Railroad (Travel Song),” which establishes a chugging ostinato in the left hand, punctuated by chords in the right. Rachmaninoff’s Prelude (Op. 32, No. 5), the first of five preludes that Mr. Tao rearranged into an emotionally charged narrative arc, employed a similar device, with the left hand creating a musical conveyor belt that transported an array of beautiful figures.

In fortissimo passages Mr. Tao produces a signature sound that is powerful and sharp, and in the first of his “vestiges,” “upon waking alongside green glass bottles,” it aptly rendered the quality of a material that is both hard and transparent. There were chiseled rhythms in “upon ripping perforated pages,” too, which gave way to a brooding hush in “upon being.” In “upon viewing two porcelain figures,” the music took on a dialectic current, with one hand seemingly fighting to break out of the repetitive strictures created in the other.

Ravel’s “Gaspard de la Nuit” brought forth a more finely graded palette in Mr. Tao’s playing, although, in these acoustics at least, it lacked the Impressionistic softness idiomatic to French music. But Mr. Tao’s “iridescence” for piano and iPad (with piano sounds transformed by an app) created an alluring sound world in which subtle crackling, scratching and static noises wrapped themselves around a surreal and dreamy waltz.