Time was when Network for New Music was one of the few such destinations. But no longer: Choral Arts Society is one of several vocal groups giving high-concept contemporary programs. So on Sunday, one had to choose between the full effect of composer Bernard Rands' Indian summer at Network and current Scottish composer James MacMillan processing modern spiritual dilemmas at Choral Arts Society with soprano-voice writing that repeatedly reaches for the skies - in vain.

My solution: Half of Rands at Settlement Music School (since the entire program will be recorded) and all of Choral Arts at the Philadelphia Cathedral in one of the better days I've had in the current music season.

The venerable Rands, 75, sounds particularly French these days: If Debussy was a harmonically liberated version of Faure, Rands liberates Debussy with atonal possibilities in a pair of 2004 works that aren't always pleasant but are beautiful in their considered points of view and deeply cultivated execution. They also reference specific French Impressionist pieces.

Rands' Prelude ". . . sans voix parmi les voix . . ." takes off from the instrumentation of Debussy's Sonata for Flute, Viola and Harp with viola and flute in solos that wander and quest, taking turns with subversive peripheral commentary on each other. The many dots in the title aren't affectation. The music has no typical sense of beginning and end (the ending magically achieves finality while avoiding any conclusion) and also speaks to the composer's plan to add more movements. I hope he's working on them this minute.

In Rands' also-excellent Walcott Songs, mezzo-soprano (the valiant Janice Felty) and cello explore possibilities similar to Ravel's Sonata for Violin and Cello. The game plan changed from song to song: "Endings" enshrined the searing clarity of Walcott's words, returning to the lines, "Things do not explode, they fail, they fade" alternating between resignation and rage. But the words in "Midsummer, Tobago" were just one of several working parts in a larger, quasi-pointillistic musical construction. Vocal lines were disjointed; pizzicato cello was wide-ranging. "The Fist," about the terror of falling in love, had voice and cello in tandem, intensifying each others' emotional states.

In the Choral Arts "Voices of Scotland" program, artistic director Matt Glandorf resourcefully sequenced a 75-minute juxtaposition of music by 16th-century Robert Carver and 21st-century MacMillan in Mass settings, their pairing acting as a contrast of centuries rather than revealing central characteristics of Scotch-ness. They do express ecstatic peaks similarly, though Carver arrives at them via the winding road of late-Renaissance polyphony that the Choral Arts singers had problems articulating, not helped by the reverberant acoustics. MacMillan's Mass launches itself from a harmonic foundation of mid-20th century British sacred music but is full of escalating harmonic tension often climaxing in stratospheric vocal writing that embodies the possibilities and limitations of temporal existence. This is not feel-good religiosity.

That was the tone set in the opening moment with MacMillan's A Child's Prayer, written in 1996 to commemorate the random shooting of schoolchildren in Dunblane, that uses a commonplace text about love and joy to create music that somehow screams and exalts simultaneously. It's extremely potent, and addresses our lives in ways that music borrowed from past centuries cannot.