Subsequently, in 2003, Voisey created the 60x60 Project, which every year showcases 60 composers, each contributing a 60-second piece. "I've had more than 1,000 composers submit to the project over the past five years," he says. "It's completely open to anybody. Spread the word. The more the merrier."
For all that, Voisey too has had to earn a living. "I've been a bookkeeper, a customer service rep, a telemarketer, an integration manager for a computer company," he says. "I haven't driven a cab yet" -- an allusion to one of the jobs Philip Glass held before he made it big. "Now I'm a financial comptroller for a labor union. I do that part time. But composing keeps me sane."
Learning to compete
THERE are, of course, less unorthodox ways for composers to get noticed. Among those who have taken a more traditional approach is Andrew Norman, 27, a 2004 USC graduate who won the prestigious American Academy Rome Prize last year.
"One of the best ways to get my work out there is through entering it in various competitions," Norman says. "Even if you don't win, people might hear it. Several opportunities came my way just by people hearing things."
One of those listeners was Steven Stucky, the L.A. Philharmonic's consulting composer for new music, who programmed Norman's "Gran Turismo" on a Monday Evening Concerts performance in February. "This is a guy clearly at the beginning of a big career," says Stucky. "This is the kind of person we have our eye on."
"All of his music appeals to me because it makes such original connections either to visual phenomena or to architecture or to thinking about design in some way," Stucky adds. "At one kind of simple level, this piece seems like a quasi-Minimalist, supercharged, drug-addled Vivaldi -- eight violinists sawing away. It's immediately visceral and exciting and like being behind a race car. It's a white-knuckle kind of music. But in the end, its appeal is in the big design that it has, which it carries out fearlessly and unsentimentally. It's music that's tough-minded."
Still, even with his Rome Prize and more than a year's worth of commissions ahead of him, Norman has a few concerns. "I could spend as much energy and time promoting my music and getting it out there as in the actual side of creating the works," he says. "It's very difficult to find that balance.
"As a young composer, I'm still dealing with how to expand my own music and find my own voice while writing pieces to other people's specifications. Composers should be versatile, but sometimes I feel that people commissioned me based on what they've heard and they might expect me to write the same thing for them. It's a challenge to go in a different direction when money gets involved."
Leanna Primiani, 32, also believes in versatility, and in search of it has branched out to work with rock producer Bob Ezrin.
"It's time composers turn off their snobbery," she says. "The thing is that classical musicians make a mistake and stick with one thing. The reality is people need music for everything. There's music on websites, so much commercial music and so much need for it. Why should we who work so hard, know so much, sit back and let someone else who buys a computer and calls himself a composer do it? People who want to can make a good living."
To date, Primiani has written music for reality TV, a horror movie and video games, as well as serious works such as "Sirens," to be premiered by conductor Leonard Slatkin and the Nashville Symphony in 2008-09. She also came to composing late, having first studied conducting at the Peabody and San Francisco conservatories. She changed direction after working with Hungarian composer-conductor Peter Eotvos in Amsterdam in 2000.
"I came back and really started to compose," says Primiani, who's completing a doctorate at USC. "I had never thought about doing it until then."
She's had a number of works performed, including the pilot of an opera, "The Truman Project," based on President Truman's angry letter to a Washington Post critic over his review of daughter Margaret's recital, presented at an Opera America conference in Seattle last year and currently in development in a Los Angeles Opera workshop.
"Trying to get something new programmed is hard enough," she says. "But is an audience going to want to hear something by a Mr. Smith or by John Corigliano? Not only is the pot small, but it actually becomes more limited because of the name recognition."
Yet she believes composers aren't unique in that respect. "Doing anything in any performance field is the same, especially in Los Angeles. There's a lot of talent. The trick for anyone in any field is to get yourself noticed and for someone to take a chance and say, 'Yes, I'll use you.' "
Other USC composers say they're prepared for a divided future as well. Steven Gates, 31, who is also finishing a doctorate, has had two songs for guitar and voice published and recorded by Doberman Editions in Canada.
