Los Angeles’s new music group Xtet is now in its 21st season. None of us knows how this has happened. For a crew that prefers to think of itself as au courant and cutting-edge, the temporal implications of this are alarming. But there’s no escaping it: these Xtet years have encompassed all the usual “passages,” both of the triumphal and the slings-and-arrows sort.

Though Xtet is nearing that alarming breaking point at which it might be referred to as “venerable,” then, it must be said the members of the group are most certainly NOT venerable. Though they do inhabit other, more respectable lives as members of LA Opera, LA Chamber Orchestra, and other performing groups, the Xtetti have managed to stay fresh and, er, youngish by fearlessly going mano a mano with the most invigorating repertoire of the two most recent millennia.

Xtet has remained more or less intact over the years, owing to its players’ shared enthusiasm for their adventuresome programming, mutual friendship, and Don Crockett’s insidiously potent margaritas, which have a dual function both in post-concert festivities, and in programming meetings, where they foster an irrational sense of our capabilities, thus enabling the above-mentioned adventuresome programming.

Xtet’s original intent was to play three kinds of literature: new music, the classics of the twentieth century, and – to silence the string players’ wheedling – some standard nineteenth century repertoire. After only a couple of seasons it became clear that the group as a whole was at its best in the 20th, and now 21st centuries. Most importantly, we had begun to develop lasting friendships with several composers – our Messrs. Crockett, Steinmetz and Johnson among them – whom we consider important and compelling, and we take pride in having given the premieres of dozens of works. It was, in short, the joy of capering at the cutting edge of music history that finally won out in our programming mix.

In search of a name, and once we had ruefully discarded the Any Excuse To Eat Ensemble, we settled on “Xtet.” This was John Steinmetz’s artful brainchild, “X” standing for a number between two and, well, there have been as many as 12 of us at a time, and reflecting our protean instrumentation. Great name, we thought: We won’t have to explain it or spell it for anyone. We were wrong.

We are grateful beyond measure to our guest musicians past and present, all of whom enrich the artistic proceedings enormously, and who must be counted among the best of sports for putting up with the mingled lunacy and rigor of Xtet rehearsals.