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When David Gilmour played Radio City Music Hall on Tuesday night, he split his concert in half. The first half, which consisted of all the songs from his new album, "On an Island" (Columbia), was the reason he was there. The second half, stocked with favorites from his band, Pink Floyd, was the reason the audience was there.

Mr. Gilmour is known as one of the most courteous avant-garde rock veterans around (though there's scant competition for the title), and some of that politeness has clearly rubbed off on the fans: they listened happily, sometimes enthusiastically, to the new stuff. And they knew that after an intermission they would get what they paid for: smoke, lasers, "Comfortably Numb."

The pioneering music of Pink Floyd changed shape so many times that it barely makes sense to talk about the band's legacy: instead, there are legacies. You could hear an antecedent of today's freak-folk scene when Mr. Gilmour sang "Dominoes," a song by the singer-songwriter Syd Barrett, who left the band shortly after Mr. Gilmour joined. You could hear a primordial form of metal during the loud squalls of "Echoes," from the 1971 album "Meddle."

And you could hear a thousand hard-rock bands in the grand, note-bending, snail's-pace guitar solos that showed up in nearly every song. Instead of trying to play circles around the music, Mr. Gilmour peels off notes so slowly that the music seems to play circles around him. (Uh-oh. Maybe it's impossible to write about a Pink Floyd song without sounding like one.)

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