South by Southwest is a gargantuan beast of a music conference. It’s also a festival that brings hordes of industry insiders, 2000 pop bands, and endless advertisers to Austin, Texas, each spring. This year the Nonclassical record label marked its third appearance, with a line-up more Austin than London, its organisation having been handed over from Gabriel Prokofiev to Steven Snowden, an Austin composer and one of the founders of a local New Music festival called Fast Forward.

South by Southwest is an unwieldy publicity machine — it’s powered not just by the executives who scout bands and take meetings, but by a shadow festival: waves of young music obsessives who attend unofficial parties, where bands play for free in dusty parking lots and clubs across the city. The crowd is rewarded not only with free drinks and free paraphernalia plastered with brand names, but also with short, energetic sets in intimate venues.

It’s no surprise, then that the classical crowd currently occupies a space alongside folk musicians and, say, Slovenian hip hop. Actually, I hesitate on the latter, as supporters of every genre lurk here, and each band has a few stalwarts.

Friday’s Nonclassical showcase, in a lamentably generic room of a Hilton hotel, didn’t draw much of a crowd. We sat in chairs, and it was so hushed that I actually remembered to silence my cell phone. Sixth Street was just a stone’s throw away, nearly 300,000 music fans shuffling between bars amid obnoxiously loud music that formed a single amorphous cloud. The Hilton’s entrance stood on an unpopular side street, with no chance of attracting passersby.

I arrived in time to see Austin’s Bel Cuore, a saxophone quartet, playing one of Jennifer Higdon’s Short Stories, the Jackson Pollock-inspired 'Splashing the Canvas'. Bel Cuore, like many of the night’s players and composers, have connections to the University of Texas at Austin and its budding composition programme. They’re earnest young musicians with a sweet tone and a smart programme, alternating Higdon’s gorgeous chords with punchy new works.

Owen Weaver, a New York percussionist with a burgeoning solo career, wore a black T-shirt and day-old beard, but he was intensely focused, his tattooed arms moving like a clock’s. Weaver and Adam Bedell faced off on crotales to play Tristan Perich’s Observations, a trance-inducing work that recalled Reich, except for its accompaniment of electronic bleeps and chimes. Perhaps the most engaging piece of the night, this was the type of music that could instantly cross over to the pop clubs on the other side of the street.

After Weaver’s set I saw Mary Blockley, an audience member who had a frown about her. 'You seem impatient,' I said.

'I am impatient,' she said. Blockley, an English professor, nodded towards the windows that had been covered in black paper. 'Whose idea was that!' she asked, incredulous. 'This is my third Nonclassical,' she said, 'and I’m afraid it’s not catching on.'

'The first was much more clubby,' she explained. (It took place in a proper bar, dead center on the action, and became a destination for local arts types and for conference attendees in need of a palate cleanser.) 'I feel like someone’s going to be reading a paper on nematodes in here,' Blockley said.

Nonclassical’s only representative this year was cellist Peter Gregson. He played work by Steve Reich, Max Richter, and Gabriel Prokofiev, each work using some form of electrical accompaniment. Except for Richter’s Vocal, the set suffered from digital reproductions that added a tin-can quality to the mix.

The crowd livened up a little around 1am for Line Upon Line, a talented young percussion ensemble who’d benefited from some pre-festival buzz on National Public Radio. With gleeful smiles, the trio played the first part of Reich’s Drumming and Xenakis’s Okho, alongside Steven Snowden’s charged A Man with a Gun Lives Here, and Ethan Frederick Greene’s Sewn, a piece for blocks and electronics.

Despite the quality of the night’s music, the programming needs some rethinking. South by Southwest is nothing like New York’s Le Poisson Rouge. Next year’s classical players might consider this: Three blocks from the ballroom there was a three-storey-tall Doritos-brand vending machine made out of scaffolding. You can try to ignore it, just like you can try to ignore the 300,000 music fans on Sixth Street and their obnoxiously loud music. But if you want to succeed here, you can’t pretend it doesn’t exist.