The Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) has a noble history – founded in 1965 as a black artists’ collective in south Chicago; pioneering force in American avant garde culture and racial politics – but that history has yet to make the subject of a noble opera. Afterword is an abysmally misconceived lecture-meets-musical by trombonist and longtime AACM member George Lewis, with a libretto based on his own essays about the organisation and semantic arguments over words such as “original” and “music”.

Its UK premiere at the Huddersfield contemporary music festival was alarming. How did a work so self-important, so heavy-handed and plain badly-crafted, ever reach the stage? Hints of Lewis’s spark as an improviser occasionally gurgle through the frenetic instrumental score (stoic playing from the International Contemporary Ensemble, conducted by David Fulmer) but the vocal writing is unbearable: drab, inflated and nonsensical, no rhyme or reason to how words and music fit together.

Sean Griffin’s torpid staging was equally dismal. It would have worked better if singers Joelle Lamarre, Gwendolyn Brown and Julian Terrell Otis had stood and spoken their lines.

If I had to name the diametric opposite of Afterword, it might well be the music of Jürg Frey, featured composer at Huddersfield this year and a master of calm, elemental and egoless sounds. Montreal’s Bozzini Quartet gave a beautiful performance of his Second and Third Quartets.

The Second is a chordal procession that unfolds at breathing pace, unpushy and peaceful, poignant for the natural fade of each chord and resilient for the slow, steady momentum that makes the music feel as though it’s always just been there. The Third revisits similar ideas but is bolstered with rhythmic variation and more tangible colour. It takes virtuosic control for string players to whisper for an hour; after such quiet and careful textures, even the applause sounded deafening.