John Adams is about midway through his term as Carnegie Hall's composer in residence. Among his responsibilities are overseeing some of the hall's professional training workshops for young performers, and being on hand to talk about his music during the informal chats that are the heart of the Making Music series. Mr. Adams accomplished both those things, at least for this season, over the last few days.

Starting Thursday, he led a workshop that included discussions and rehearsals of his works, and on Monday evening he conducted the participants in a zesty account of his Chamber Symphony (1992). The performance was the conclusion of a Making Music program in which Mr. Adams and Ara Guzelimian, Carnegie's artistic adviser, discussed the composer's chamber music.

For anyone who still thinks of Mr. Adams as a Minimalist, the four works on the program, all composed since 1992, should help dispel that notion. A repetitive figure peeks through occasionally, almost as a teaser, but these are mostly works of unregulated eclecticism. The influences of jazz, blues, rock and cartoon soundtracks mingle with the restless spirit of contemporary composition, tied together by gestures of Mr. Adams's invention.

"Hallelujah Junction" (1996), a two-piano work played with appealingly sharp edges by Nicolas Hodges and Rolf Hind, begins with a Minimalist shimmer, a reference, perhaps, to Steve Reich's method of taking two identical instruments and moving them out of phase. But that lasts only a few seconds: the lines are quickly differentiated, and the work's three movements tumble through ragtime fragments, stretches of mechanistic ebullience, disjointed syncopations and even, briefly, singing lyricism.

Similar qualities enlivened "American Berserk" (2001), a short, volatile solo piano work to which Mr. Hodges gave a virtuosic, driven performance, and "Road Movies" (1995), a freewheeling violin and piano work with an idiomatic tilt toward vigorous fiddling, particularly in the perpetual-motion finale. Leila Josefowicz, the violinist, and John Novacek, the pianist, applied considerable power and rhythmic precision to the fast outer movements, and shifted gears efficiently for the more sensitive dialogue that comes between them.

Another hint of Mr. Adams's Minimalist past made a cameo appearance in the Chamber Symphony -- this time an insistent figure, in the style of Philip Glass, at the start of the finale. But the layers of dissonance and fast-changing rhythmic complexity were not of that world; in fact, there were moments when the piece had more in common with Stravinsky than with either Glass or Schoenberg, whose Chamber Symphony was, to some extent, Mr. Adams's model. The student ensemble played the piece brilliantly.