Last Wednesday fewer than 40 people attended what one professor called the most important concert he’d seen in his five years at SF State.

“This marks the beginning of two spectacular careers,” piano professor Roger Woodward said at a gala after the hour-long recital by senior composition students Sepand Shahab and Joseph Rogers III. “In the years to come these gentlemen will be famous, and we will be able to point to this and say, ‘I was there.’”

Rogers, 23, and Shahab, 26, sat together at one of the stage’s two pianos to open the Knuth Hall show with a pair of selections from famed Hungarian composer György Kurtag. The music was slow and halting, with a complex melody amidst sparse rhythm.

Spacious gaps of silence in the music were punctuated throughout the night by a chill in the theater. It was cold, and most attendees kept their sweaters and jackets on throughout the show.

Two other pianists came to the stage to play Rogers’ piece, “Patterns,” which Rogers said he composed through improvisation, focusing on a minimalist style. The piece moved quickly, with perhaps the most distinct rhythm of the evening and melodies that were easier to discern.

“I was really amazed by ‘Patterns,’” said creative writing major Rebecca Vertun, 19, who attended the show. “It tugged at my heartstrings the most, even more than most modern music. It hit me on an emotional level as opposed to a cerebral one, like the other pieces.”

Rogers explained that minimalism doesn’t have to mean slow or laconic music; one of the defining aspects of the style is repetition, playing the same series of notes over and over. He said he increased the speed of the piece to offset its melodic redundancy and keep it engaging.

Rogers’ only piece that he performed himself was “Dodecaphone,” an experiment in 12-tone music techniques Rogers explained as being incredibly mathematical.

“On a piano, if you pick out a ‘C’ key and find the next ‘C’ one octave up or down, there will be 12 tones between those two keys,” Rogers said. “In 12-tone music, once you’ve played a ‘C,’ you can’t repeat it until you’ve played each of the other tones.”

The style comes from musical theories that likely predict the evolution of music, Rogers said, but when the style came into prominence in the 1920s it almost totally lost the audience for this kind of composition.

“It’s all about displacing the melodic center, and avoiding repetition, which can make it harder for an audience to follow,” he said.

Not everyone in the audience had that trouble; music student Joaquin Gallegos, 21, said he didn’t see where the piece was going at first, but that with patience he’d seen it build into something exciting.

“I really like dissonance, and he used it really well,” Gallegos said. “The way it moved along from calm to jumpy and back, it kept you on your toes.”

Shahab played a four-part piece called “Diptych” with a flutist to duet with his piano playing. The music was remarkably spare, with a series of deliberate call-and-reply rallies between the piano and the flute.

“I loved the parts that were really quiet,” Gallegos said. “The notes sounded almost like harmonics, because they were playing so lightly. It becomes less about the notes themselves, so that you could hear the hammers and wood clicking in the instruments. I love silence – I love it – and it was almost like getting to hear silence at the same time as the pitches were playing.”

Woodward explained his praise for the show, saying it was a totally uncompromising performance.

“There were no gestures to the dramatic, to nostalgia or romanticism,” he said. “They are finding something completely new. Sepand is a brilliant composer; I haven’t heard anyone anywhere in the world in the last 20 years with that sheer talent.”

Not everyone was so taken with the style.

“It was a pretty good show, but I didn’t like the slow ones,” said Gordon Chin, 35, a tech support worker who said he likes to attend SF State concerts. “I know they want people to look at each note carefully, but I kept waiting for something to happen. I liked [‘Patterns’]. When it’s faster, it’s more exciting, more riveting, more energetic. It’s like an action movie: it made me more awake.”

Shahab said he sees the ability to play for others as an added bonus; the main draw of composing for him is the effort to learn about himself.

“Emotionally, I’m trying to balance more expressive and objective kinds of music,” he said. “Like a lot of my work, ‘Diptych’ has to do with memory, with things that are far away and fuzzy, or sharper, coming in and out of focus, and the music reflects that wavering focus.”

Rogers currently works as a conductor for the Bay Area Chamber Symphony, and his music is available for digital sampling at www.josephrogersiii.com. Shahab is a member of the Society of Composers, Inc., and can be contacted through the group’s Web site at www.societyofcomposers.org.